THE HIDDEN SIDE OF GREYHOUND RACING

According to recent reports would-be promoters of the as yet illegal greyhound racing industry tout the legalisation of this industry as having the potential to create 30 000 jobs and provide a R1,5bn tax offspin. Indeed a preliminary report from that University in the land of BROC (Braaivleis, Rugby, Oranjejag and Canned Lion Hunting) would presume to support this.

The statements made are clearly a sop pandering to top politicians, in order to try and legalise what should remain banned. If we are now to legalise this form of animal exploitation, then why not legalise drug dealing, child pornography and the human slave trade? That would create a lot of jobs and tax offspin too.

But any offspin from Greyhound racing would only be short-term. Greyhound racing has not worked anywhere else in Africa, being patronised for a number of years and then falling into disuse, creating an animal welfare crises because of the surplus animals. Furthermore, supporting greyhound racing would draw people away from the Lotto which at least benefits a wide range of good causes across the board such as Child Welfare, Animal Welfare, Aids etc.

But worst of all are the abuses inherent in this cruel and unethical 'sport' which critics oppose on the following grounds:

Only one in two dogs is deemed fit for racing, leading to tens of thousands of healthy dogs being killed every year. Some trainers prefer to drown or starve their dogs to death, thus preventing unwanted veterinary bills. Many more end up in laboratories, only to be further tortured by vivisectors conducting 'research.'

Once the 50% who 'make it' begin serious training, around their first birthday, they are kept in cages their entire racing lives – cages so small (90cm x 120 cm x 90 cm high) that they have room only to stand up and turn around. The backs and thighs of many racing dogs are worn bare and some dogs develop sores from lying in their cages for extended periods. A total of 22½ hours a day are spent in these crates.

The Greyhounds' freest moments come in the matter of seconds they spend racing. Yet this freedom is not without risk. Dogs rocketing out of their starting boxes are bunched tightly and turns on the racetrack are challenging. Spills can fracture bones and cause other injuries. The normal rigours of racing cause foot-pad abrasions, sprained ligaments and fractured right-front hocks, which absorb most of the concussion as dogs bend around counterclockwise turns.

Barbaric training techniques, such as tying a live rabbit to the mechanical arm, though illegal, are commonplace as many people believe that dogs trained on live lures qualify for racing twice as often as dogs trained on mechanical devices.

Very few retired greyhounds are ever re-homed as they first have to be rehabilitated before being adopted out. This requires a great deal of time and patience.

But in the end, the real issue here is that the exploitation of animals and turning them into commodities is part of a bigger picture of exploitation of the defenceless, whether human or non-human. It's up to us to decide whether our country is in need of a moral regeneration or whether we can afford to exploit sentient beings in the quest for a fast buck for the enrichment of a few.

HOW ROBBEN ISLAND WAS ROBBED OF ITS HERITAGE

In An Unnatural Order we described how the Cape fur seal originated in the Cape, where 85% of the offshore islands are situated. Due to over fishing, sealing and banning, these colonies became extinct and seals fled north, to be further driven off the few islands off Namibia, until forced onto the mainland where currently 80% of all pups are born. One in four pups are caught by jackals and this has resulted in jackals’ numbers increasing due to the seal pup feed, disturbing even further nature’s natural balance. Not only do they have to contend with the marauding jackals, but human culling of seals on the mainland have forced the seals to flee north, with the newest and fastest growing seal colony, Cape Frio, being very close to the Angolan border. The further north seals are driven to escape government marine conservationists and scientists, the closer they get to the equator where they are unable to survive warm tropical weather and water. So one could say that the government, unchecked, is in fact driving the species to extinction.

We now describe how, in a previous unspoiled state, there existed a seal utopia on an island of 507 hectares, off Cape Town. This beautiful paradise, now lost, teemed with a rich wild life consisting of mostly seals and some sea birds. It was named Robben Island (Seal Island).

Today, because of government and Marine and Coastal Management (MCM) policy, there is not one seal left on Robben Island. Over-fishing and Apartheid style forced removals drove them from their historical breeding sites, causing the seals to become 'second rate citizens' - scavengers on their natural habitats.

There is a parallel: Established in the 1920s, the vibrant multi-cultural community at Sophiatown, Johannesburg, was a thorn in the side of the Apartheid-government. Not only did it prove that various races could live side-by-side in harmony, it was also a freehold township, which meant that it was one of the rare places in South African urban areas where blacks were allowed to own land.

Sophiatown was also the centre of a black cultural revolution. It was here that the most important developments in indigenous jazz took place and the products of Sophiatown included jazz masters such as Hugh Masekela, Jonas Gwangwa and Abdullah Ibrahim (then known as Dollard Brand), the poet Don Mattera, singers like Dolly Rathebe, Dorothy Masuku and Miriam Makeba and artists such as Gerard Sekoto.

In support of their ideology, the Apartheid government enforced the relocation of Sophiatown residents. Families were forcibly removed from their homes, their possessions loaded on the back of police trucks and dumped in Meadowlands in Soweto. Many formerly prosperous people were thus impoverished. Over the next eight years the vibrant Sophiatown was flattened and removed from the maps of Johannesburg to make way for a low-cost residential suburb for whites only, created by the policy of Apartheid. A Machiavellian touch saw Sophiatown renamed Triomf - Afrikaans for "triumph."

History has a way of repeating itself and the S.A. government, in the guise of Nature Conservation, saw fit to apply this model to South Africa's seal population, enforcing their removal to awash rocks, unfit for breeding, while proclaiming as exclusive 'bird islands,' the seals' historical breeding sites. These included 11 islands around which walls were built to prevent the seals from returning there. The seabird droppings, guano, were considered a commercial money spinner.

But back to Robben Island , which was later to become an island prison for opponents of the Apartheid state and was, for 26 years, the home of the most famous political prisoner of all, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela. The island was proclaimed a world heritage site, a wild life reserve and a protected seal island.

Sadly, today there is not one seal left - they have all been chased off the island and have had to seek refuge elsewhere. Robben Island became a centre of tourism, weekend weddings, an upmarket fundraising venue and the like. Furthermore, having driven the original seal colony from their historic breeding site, MCM saw fit to introduce twenty three species of non-indigenous mammals while Tahrs on Table Mountain were being shot, for the very reason that they were not indigenous!

The banning of seals from Robben Island is apparently illegal, but nobody seems to want to do anything to stop it. A letter from Francois Hugo of Seal Alert-SA to the UNESCO World Heritage committee elicited no reply.

Then in a magnanimous gesture, Seal Alert-S.A. was eventually informed by the Chairperson of the Robben Island Committee, Ahmat Kathrada, as well as Herman Oosthuizen, the MCM scientist most closely involved with seal issues, that the seals could have 40% of the western coastline of Robben Island. Would they allow Seal Alert-SA to re-introduce the seals which had for so long been banned, in an attempt to get re-colonization going and thereby restoring the natural order? Oh no, that would be going too far. It had to be a natural process. “If it happens, it happens.”

It has now been two years and still no seals have returned to the island, a strange phenomenon, considering that there is plenty of fish around it.

Could it be that the seals are in fact being prevented from re-colonising the island? It is a fact that conservation authorities are chasing seals off and away from all the other islands. Why would seals breed on a small rock to the north, and in the waterfront, and 20km to the south at Hout Bay but not repopulate Robben - if not disturbed? Dead and shot seals wash ashore onto the island, why not alive seals trying to repopulate? So many questions …...

Snout decided it would investigate and so we contacted Herman Oosthuizen

who strongly refuted the fact that there were walls built around islands in order to keep the seals off. He also re-iterated that the seals could return to Robben Island but that it had to be a natural process. “The seals must decide,” the gentleman said.

But the intrepid Google Earth had another story to tell. There are clearly walls built around some islands as captured by their eye-in-the-sky. Vondeling and Dyer are just two of them. So somewhere something was wrong. Could there be a misunderstanding?

Snout e-mailed Herman Oosthuizen the following questions:

1. Are there any walls on the S.A. islands: Dyer, Vondeling and Marcus?

2. Could you please list which islands are protected under the ACT ?

3. Are the seals allowed to re-populate those islands?

4. What is MCM policy with regard to seals re-populating Bird Island, St Croix, Seal Island, Dyer, Robben, Dassen, Vondeling, Malgas, Marcus ?

To date there has been no response to our repeated enquiries.

AN UNNATURAL ORDER

Few people are aware of just how our marine heritage has come to be destroyed through human greed and over fishing and how forced removals and displacements, closely following the social engineering lines of our Apartheid past, disturbed the natural order of our marine life, causing the starvation of seals and sea birds alike and creating enmity where none existed..

Seven hundred years ago there was an estimated 20 million seals living on less than 46 barren islands along our coastline, 80% of these islands are found off the Cape/South African coast and 20% in Namibia.

The largest of these islands was Robben Island, named after the seals that colonised it. Being the top predator, seals dominated these few islands, although from earliest historical accounts, they shared the islands with seabirds with whom they lived in harmony. This was as nature intended.

Over millions of years, seals had evolved to play a most vital role in the eco-food chain off this coast. Their task was to remove the sick and the weak from migratory fish species that would mature far to the north, and then migrate south to spawn, before making the long journey back. This migratory fish selectivity ensured that the species they preyed upon remained healthy.

The islands, which were well placed geographically, would provide bountiful prey of the right size for the growing pups. The seal population was kept in check by a variety of factors, affording the alpha bulls and mating cows the opportunity to control their own population size, limited by the size of each island. The result of this unique relationship between seals, the size of their population, their islands and their prey, was a sea teaming with fish of many species and thus one of the most productive fisheries in the world - a fact soon discovered by man who systematically set about raping the environment in an unsustainable manner.

He started with the biggest, easiest and most visible, the whales. When depleted and no longer commercially viable, he moved on to the seals, the seabirds, their eggs and then, with regard to the offshore islands, the guano (bird droppings) scrapping them clean. His commercial mind then turned towards the seas where, in turn, he pillaged the surface shoaling fish, the big game deep water fish, the line fish, then the bottom dwelling fish and then even the sea-plants, his greed escalating commensurate with his profits.

Apart from ever increasing human consumption, this food chain was turned into dried and processed ‘fishmeal’ to be used in pet foods and live stock farming, despite seafood never having formed part of these land based animals’ natural diet. In fact, it is said that over 70% of the industry is dedicated to making ‘fish meal’.

In the wake of this rampant pillaging an entire echo system was destroyed and entire species were left in tatters. And the resultant cost to the environment carried an even greater one – a fresh water bill, allegedly far in excess of R 150 000 per month for washing fish at just one fish plant, instead of using freely available salt water. This is obscene in a country that is urged to conserve water as it is estimated that South Africa will run out of fresh water in at most 10 years.

But we digress.

Extensive sealing over the past few centuries saw all these offshore seal colonies collapse. By 1900 seals were virtually extinct. No longer hunted, they attempted to rebuild their destroyed colonies and fulfil their vital role. But their historic breeding habitats, their islands, were now denied to them.

One of the first consequences of this man-made imbalance in the natural environment was an unnatural growth and over population in the numbers of seabirds, due to less competition for space and prey and so they took over these former seal islands which had now become exploited for seabirds, their eggs and lucrative guano, by the human greed machine. So desperate were seals to re-colonize their offshore islands once again, that government was forced to build walls on 11 of the largest to keep them off permanently. With few available islands now situated in their historical, migratory fishing grounds, seals had few options and so, unnaturally, took to breeding on 16 small awash rocks, not suitable for their pups. The price the seals paid was high - almost all their newborn would be washed away.

Overcrowding became an issue and so around 1940 the seals were forced to begin breeding on the mainland for the first time, thus forever altering the evolutionary path of this species. By 1950, their numbers had sufficiently recovered to facilitate renewed interest in them, not because of their profitability in harvesting, but because of the concern they might in future pose to the now lucrative fishing industry, already feeling the effects of over fishing in the 1960's.

Because of dwindling numbers, the Cape Fur Seal became a protected species and up to 1990 the South African government, which at that time controlled both South Africa and Namibia, was involved in the administration of commercial harvesting of these creatures, this ‘harvesting’ being driven by the need for the manufacture of Scottish sporrans, a traditional export business. There was no other market for their skins. But the genitals of these hapless creatures are sought after for use as an aphrodisiac in eastern countries, already suffering a burgeoning over population.

In 1990, following a public outcry about the cruel clubbing to death of seals by untrained labour, the S.A. government placed a moratorium on commercial sealing. But by that time, with the independence of Namibia , dwindling breeding grounds in South Africa had forced the Cape Fur Seal to colonize the Namibian mainland where the cruel commercial slaughter continued.

Bizarrely, seals are today only found on 1% of the offshore island land mass with an unnatural domination on 99% of the off-shore islands by seabirds, the weaker lower species in the food-chain.

However, even in this bizarre situation, with probably the biggest mass mortality of top predators the world has ever seen, there is still hope. This hope comes in the form of the highest law in the land, the Constitution, which states: "the harvest of a natural resource (fish) has to be done in a sustainable manner."

By introducing seals back to one single island, as suggested by Francois Hugo of S.A. Seal Alert, we can alter the evolutionary path of seals back to what nature intended – but then we would have to harvest in a sustainable manner.

(See: How Robben Island was robbed of its heritage.)

ANIMAL RIGHTS ASSESSED

The recent fires in the Helderberg elicited no uproar about the small animals burnt alive, as there would have been if domestic animals had been involved. To some extent this then illustrates the difference between the Animal Rights (A/R) and Animal Welfare movements.

Whilst the latter does not accord equal status to the various species of animals, the A/R movement sees all animals as individuals of equal and intrinsic value. Accordingly, whereas the abuse of cats, dogs and horses might attract wide public condemnation, the lot of the dassie for example, or the farm animal does not elicit the same level of concern.

The A/R movement abhors what it considers the moral schizophrenia of loving our pets while turning a blind eye to others being led to cruel slaughter.

In his 1996 book Rain Without Thunder, Professor Francione, Professor of Law at Rutgers University, traces the emergence of the Rights movement as a direct reaction to the conservative philosophy of Animal Welfare. He postulates that, in order to stop animal exploitation, the AR movement has to take a more radical stand that recognises that animals are not property and that they have fundamental and inalienable rights. The welfare movement, which morally accepts that animals may be exploited as long as they are treated 'humanely', is therefore not able to accomplish the real goal, which is the elimination of the property status of animals.

The A/R movement, which has a long philosophical history, has been described as the last of the great freedom movements. Like racism and sexism, it has its fundamental origins in a patriarchal society where blacks, women and animals were seen as inferior. Thus, when philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, forerunner of later feminists, published her Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792, her ideas were ridiculed and elicited the response: "Women's rights? They will be telling us animals have rights next!"

The churches also long played a part in the general acceptance of women, animals and blacks as inferior beings with the status of ‘property.’

The Rev. Andrew Linzey, director of the Centre for Theology and Ethics at Essex University, England, admits that Christian theology ‘served long and well the oppressors of slaves, women and animals. It took 1900 years for theologians to question seriously the morality of slavery and even longer, the oppression of women. #olHolcombe wrote confidentlytof slaery a the @

But there are indications that the Christian Churches are rethinking the role of humans' relationship to animals and there is a steadily increasing amount of serious scholarship addressing the theme of human responsibility to the created order.

Archbishop Robert Runcie warned in 1988 that “our concept of God forbids the idea of a cheap creation, of a throw-away universe in which everything is expendable save human existence."

It is this view of animals as soulless, lowly beings which helped the growing commercial commodification of animals as subjects to be exploited in animal husbandry, in factory farming and as subjects for entertainment.

Marjorie Spiegel, in her book The Dreaded Comparison - Human and Animal Slavery (1966) describes the hunting and trapping of slaves: the branding; the transport ships where more than half the occupants typically died in the dreaded Middle Passage; the break-up of families and lovers at auctions; the rapes; the beatings; the forced labour and the subjugation to every whim of the master. Substitute 'animal' for 'slave' and one has a snapshot of what routinely happens to non-human animals.

In the late 1960's, respected philosophers raised important ethical issues. Prof. Peter Singer in his 1976 book Animal Liberation elaborated on the concept of 'speciesism'. He argued that speciesism was very much like racism and sexism, which made arbitrary distinctions between individuals, based on colour and sex. He went on to define animals' moral status according to their capacity to suffer.

In his subsequent book in 1984, 'The Case for Animal Rights,' Lawyer Tom Regan went on to accord rights to all creatures that could be the subject of a life and had qualities such as memory, beliefs, preferences and emotional status. Not least of these rights he considered to be the right to life.

Prof. Steven M. Wise of Harvard Law School, in his book 'Rattling the Cage. Toward Legal Rights for Animals (2000) repeatedly makes the point that just as the ancient world regarded slaves (and sometimes women) as personal property, our own society until recently did so as well. Slaves, like animals, were considered incapable of reason, intelligence, or any higher-order thinking and could be bought, sold or discarded because they were owned. Disregard for the living being which does not have legal rights, Wise says, threatens the disregard for all living beings. These are arguments that would be of interest not only to those who are interested in animal rights, but human rights as well.

The Animal Rights movement, once considered beyond the pale as was the human rights- and feminism movements, today has some very well respected proponents and is rapidly achieving mainstream approval.

Beatrice Wiltshire is a resident of Somerset West and writes in her personal capacity.