Friends of Enchanted Rock- Clean up day

"The Friends of Enchanted Rock (FOER) is a volunteer based, non-profit organization committed to the preservation, protection and improvement of Enchanted Rock State Natural Area.  Our mission is to work in partnership with Texas Parks and Wildlife to maintain and protect the natural beauty of Enchanted Rock State Natural Area for future generations to enjoy." http://www.friendsofenchantedrock.com/about-us

On the weekend of May 6th, I went down to Enchanted Rock to help the Friends clean up the park. We walked around the entire are, picking up bottles, paper towels, things brought there by a combination of wind, laziness, and a lack of courtesy. This was such an amazing experience!

The coordinator, Scott Harris, was so passionate about the park. He wasn't mad at the people for leaving their trash. He said that, "You can't get mad at someone for ignorance." He blamed the problem on a lack of education, stating that children are raised thinking there is always someone to pick up after them, and that mindset carries over to their daily activites. He said instead of being mad that they left their trash, we should be thankful that they came to the park. He went on to talk about "Nature Deficit Disorder"

"A lack of routine contact with nature may result in stunted academic and developmental growth. This unwanted side-effect of the electronic age is called Nature Deficit Disorder (NDD). The term was coined by author Richard Louv in his book Last Child in the Woods in order to explain how our societal disconnect with nature is affecting today's children. Louv says we have entered a new era of suburban sprawl that restricts outdoor play, in conjunction with a plugged-in culture that draws kids indoors." -http://www.education.com/facts/quickfacts-ndd/what-is-nature-deficit-disorder/

Scott explained that although the term was coined from a book, it still poses a major problem. A couple of months ago, Jeff Corwin came to town and I was lucky enough to get an interview with him to talk about how we view nature today.



As Corwin explained, we have to encourage kids to get outdoors. Scott Harris said, "The more someone appreciates something, the more likely they are to protect it." That's what I wanted to get out of my trip. I wanted to learn to appreciate nature more, so that I could help protect it. By cleaning the park, we made someones trip more enjoyable. That someone will go back and talk about their enjoyable trip and the chain reaction happens. By working with the Friends of Enchanted Rock, I am helping find the cure to "Nature Deficit Disorder." One case at a time.

SLP Tucker Hess Animal shelter

Whenever I first began looking for places to volunteer, I thought it’d be easy. However, I was surprised that most places actually needed to know in advance, and wouldn’t let me. I found this confusing because it’s volunteer work after all, and I thought these animals could use my help. The first place I went was PetSmart. After being there for a while and playing with the kittens, I tried to take a picture with them. The guy at PetSmart said there were no pictures allowed, and so I told him I had to leave. On the way out, I saw a man in beat down clothes with a leash in his hand. On the other end of the leash was a Siberian Huskey. I decided to get a picture with the dog, and then the man tried to get me to adopt the Huskey from him. Wow, I thought. This is a $3000 dog, and it is so tamed and beautiful! “How much?” I asked. The man gave me a very confused face and said, “A good home. That is all.” This, for some reason, touched me deeply. I almost felt ashamed that I thought about how much money the dog would cost before I thought of anything. I was even more shocked that PetSmart would give away a dog like that for free. However, I saw the man checking out at the register, buying dog food. After talking to him outside, the man said the only reason he couldn’t keep the dog anymore is because he could not afford him. He said he would make ends meet for the dog and bringing him to the shelter was the last option in his mind. This is when I decided I should actually do some volunteer work instead of just taking a picture with the Huskey in PetSmart and trying to use it.

When I got to the shelter, it seemed like a pretty nice place, and I noticed that there was no A/C. The people working at the shelter also did not look very happy. I assumed that there was no A/C because of the budget that they were on. I guess people don’t put as much money into the animal shelters as they should. It made me wonder whether or not it was state or federally funded. Anyhow, I soon realized why everyone was in such a gloomy mood. When I entered the room with the dogs and saw all the kennels my heart dropped. The smell alone created an environment that was very uncomfortable. Then came all the whines and groans of the dogs, which clearly indicated that they were unhappy. The kennels at the shelter reminded me a lot like a jail cell, but I wondered what their crimes were. It made me think of animal rights, and how they really didn’t have any. Even though they were given food and water, I still think prisoners receive better treatment, even when they are in their for crimes they committed. The dogs’ crimes were simply being “wild” or “stray,” which are words we humans created anyway. It is this anthropocentric view that looks at “wild dogs” as a problem because they aren’t domesticated. This view is similar to that of Aristotle: “Tamed animals have a better nature than wild, and all tamed animals are better off when ruled by man.” However, being at the shelter showed me that this was not true. I feel like the dogs would much have been running around outside in the wild than cramped up in a little cage all day, so are they really better off when ruled by man? The dogs almost sounded like they were crying because they wanted some free space; after all, dogs need to be walked every day.

It is this form of specieism that holds humans above these dogs, and so people see nothing wrong with leaving a dog in a crate or kennel all day, just as long as it has food and water. However, more forms of specieism exist. Do we hold certain animals to higher standards than others? Think about the eagle, for instance. Why aren’t there any eagles in animal shelters? After all, aren’t they wild and stray? Humans have given certain animals specific values and purposes over other animals. What makes one animal be able to roam free in the wild, while the other (the dog) gets trapped and imprisoned, and in the long run even killed for doing so. How should we regard animals, then? I think we should reinforce that all animals are equal, so we should treat them the same whether an eagle, dog, or ant. We should also give animals certain individual rights. While in the kennel room, I walked up to each dog and gave them the same amount of attention, and each dog gazed at me with the same sorrow-filled eyes, as if they knew something dreadful was coming. None of them appeared to have rabies, which is also an ideology created from intersectionality. “Stray” dogs are instantly characterized as diseased animals. Looking into animals’ eyes is the best way to see them as a subject-of-a-life. This means they have a memory, expectations, desires, and emotions, which they openly express if you pay attention. If you have ever had a dog, you know the feeling of coming home after a long vacation and seeing just how excited your dog is. They remember you. How human is that?

After this service learning project, I think of animal shelters differently. The whole idea of the animal shelter is supposed to be to help the animals and keep them alive if they are healthy to live. However, I noticed just how expensive it was to adopt one of the dogs. Some of them were $200, and this is $200 of pure profit for the animal shelter, seeing as they are strays. If the shelter can’t sell the animal, then they gas it to save food costs. Gassing is an expensive procedure itself, so I wonder why this is so commonly the alternative to setting them free in the wild. It also made me think of “The Humane Society” as a whole. How can they claim to be so humane when they gas dogs rather than let them go? I think if government can provide funds for many needless human organizations, then they should also fund the animal shelters. If animals had the vote, I’m sure they’d agree with me. A higher budget for the animal shelter would mean better treatment and quality of living for the animals, and we should want that, as “our duties towards animals are merely indirect duties towards humanity.” We are all animals.

Picking Up

For my community service, I decided to go out and pick up trash. It seems like the most common idea that people think of when they hear 'community service', but a lot of people would choose anything other than having to pick up someone else's trash. Honestly, I was embarrassed when cars drove past the tracks where I was picking up trash. It almost seemed like a punishment. The end result was actually rewarding though. I made my roommate help me because I didn't want to pick up bottles and bags for several hours alone.

Trash is considered a form of pollution. Now, don't get me wrong, it's not as deadly as polluted air, but still has severe consequences. It affects the way plants grow and most items of garbage are dangerous to animals. Summers' article "Eat Pollution" said it's "benifits and burdens solely in terms of individual rights and responsibilities". The article discussed contaminated pollutions that effect us, people. But litter, other than just a sight for sore eyes, doesn't effect people too much. People need to live with the enviroment rather than thinking the envirment is meant for them. Summers quote says responsibility comes from individuals; so each person could find a trash can but are generally too lazy. Robert Higgins and Robert Figueroa both discuss how pollution relates to race, or the less fortunate. I disagree with this. Many people who seem less fortunate are just lazy and happy, or atleast content, with that. The lazy ones are the same ones who don't pick up after themselves and don't care about others. In the case of what I experienced while picking up trash along the traintracks, I saw litter flooding down the sides of the tracks by all the small, falling apart, homes. When we made it farther down to where the tracks backed up to a few business buildings, there was much less trash. Why is this? Simply because the business men care enough to show their customers that they run a clean business. So, it may seem that poorer communities are trashy because no one cares about the people living there, but really the people living there need to care about themselves and their neighbors to really turn things around.

So my community service taught me that a little time makes a big difference and everyone needs to take a few minutes of their day to pick something up off the ground as they pass over it. It's better for the enviroment and has an overall better look.

(SLP) Fishing with the Family, to preserve & protect

My student learning project consisted of day fishing with my family. This was not your ordinary day of fishing, this was a both a learning experience and the passing down of a lifelong heritage. Gaard goes into the traditions of the Makah and how a culture needs to be protected

“To support their claim, the Makah point to their tribe’s over two-thousand-year-old tradition of whale hunting. Tribes around the Puget Sound area as well as up and down the Pacific Coast have long recognized the Makah as a whaling nation. To the Makah, waling is a crucial part of their cultural identity.”(p.6)

Every time I take my family out on fishing or hunting trips I do my best to teach them about how important nature is. Not only to the sustainment we need to survive, but for the existence of life itself. I would like them to take on the goal of conservation. This entails the continuing existing of an ecosystem and everything involved in it. This process limits the suffering of animals to only death; if the process is done properly there should be no suffering at all. This is a process that must be understood, we need food to survive and animals are a source of that substance. I do not believe in the suffering of animals, like the ones on the factory farms. Pollen explains this in his readings.

“Which brings us -- reluctantly, necessarily -- to the American factory farm, the place where all such distinctions turn to dust. It's not easy to draw lines between pain and suffering in a modern egg or confinement hog operation. These are places where the subtleties of moral philosophy and animal cognition mean less than nothing, where everything we've learned about animals at least since Darwin has been simply . . . set aside. To visit a modern CAFO (Confined Animal Feeding Operation) is to enter a world that, for all its technological sophistication, is still designed according to Cartesian principles: animals are machines incapable of feeling pain. Since no thinking person can possibly believe this anymore, industrial animal agriculture depends on a suspension of disbelief on the part of the people who operate it and a willingness to avert your eyes on the part of everyone else.”(New York times post, An Animals Place)

By becoming self-sustainable we can eliminate the factory farms all together. This puts the reality of the death the animals go through, hopefully changing the mind of people about factory farms with the torture of animals.

Teaching my family how to fish is a great way to spend time with them, and at the same time I can hopefully change the future. This also allows us to get away from the anthropocentric ways and understand why we don’t take the small fish or pregnant ones. It is important to see the ecosystem as a whole, and it does not center on us but we must work together with every part in it to survive.

Also learned in the experience is how challenging it can be to become self sustainable. This teaches us to use the entire animal to its fullest not wasting any of it. A lot of people forget to realize the problems we would encounter without population control. This would lead to a widespread disease and the destruction of an ecosystem. Leopold has a good statement on the balance of nature.

“The image commonly employed in conservation education is “the balance of nature.”For reasons too lengthy to detail here, this figure of speech fails to describe accurately what little we know about the land mechanism.”(p.114)

Do I think things need to stay the way they are, NO we need to find change not only for our family but for the existence of the planet as we know it. By getting back to nature, like we did by fishing, we see the impact of the issues affecting the world today. We come face to face with issue like pollution, over population, and the destruction to all our natural environments. When we come face to face with the problems at hand, we as the people will be more likely to do something about it.

Puppies and Loveeee

[ SIDE NOTE: Let's use the poop canisters (see above), y'all. Let's not contribute to the piles of feces from factory farming that has already engulfed the planet. ]

I went to the Denton Humane Society for my volunteer work, a place where people bring in animals that have been either found or want to be given up by their owners. Places like this can be found all over the world, and all of them are equally as upsetting as the next. It’s wonderful that there are good Samaritans in the world that are willing to give up their valuable time and effort in order to help these abandoned animals when no one else will. When I volunteered, I did all of the basic tasks the first day: cleaning out of the cages, feeding and cleaning the animals. There were some seasoned volunteers who were in charge of minor treatments for some of the animals that had been injured prior to coming to the shelter. My objective going there was mostly just to help out any way that I could. I am a huge animal lover, and seeing animals suffering is unbearable to me, so whether or not I learned anything new or did anything exciting, I was just happy to go to help. One of the women I talked to said that she had been volunteering every week for almost a decade, and since all of her kids had gone off to college she said that she had found a sense of peace coming to the shelter to help the animals. I think we forget sometimes that dogs and cats are products of human creations -we bred them to be our companions - and by throwing them away, we take away all sense of self-worth from the animals.

There was a Pitbull in particular that absolutely broke my heart. He had cuts all over his face and neck, and it was obvious that his previous owner had been attempting to use him as a fighting machine. The very idea of using as an animal simply for monetary gain by the owner is a sad example of anthropocentrism, something that occurs on a daily basis. The fact that animal shelters of this magnitude exist in the first place only reinforces the idea that humans homogenize pets and regard them – dogs, cats, and other animals – simply as property, and once they are no longer interesting they can be discarded just like any other object. It is terrible and heartbreaking, especially when you see the effects of this worldview: dogs with such sad, sad eyes pleading you to be set free from behind those dirty rusty bars. Some dogs, particularly the ones that have been there for a long time, simply look at you, and when I saw a shepherd like that, it struck me for a moment almost like déjà vu. As Berger illustrated, animals have a very different type of gaze than humans, and looking into that dog’s eyes almost made me think of something feral – a creature that was once wild and in its prime but whose fire has now dulled to a soft flickering coal, barely gleaming in its bed of ashes.

Volunteering at the animal shelter made me think a lot about the Leopold readings, and in particular: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.” This really stood out to me for some reason; it reminded me of a woman I saw just as I was leaving the shelter. She had a baby raccoon in her arms, and they were in the midst of transporting it back to her house. She told me that she rescues injured animals that she finds or that people give her, and she nurses them back to health before releasing them back into the wild. To me, this is a prime example of preserving the integrity of mankind by attempting to fix the damage we humans have caused by plaguing the earth with our filth and mess. We build and excavate and tear down whole forests with no regard to the creatures whose home is that tree you just ripped down.

I originally considered my volunteer work to just be the cleaning aspect of it, but after I left the first day I felt like I hadn't done enough. So I went back, and they allowed me to walk some of the dogs are a nearby field when I came back the next day, but not all since some of the dogs were a bit to riled up to be handled by strangers outside of their kennels. This is understandable… being kept caged up in a strange place and being handled by strange people. My favorite was the retriever mutt whose picture you will find above; he was by far the sweetest, but it was obvious that his previous owners had neglected him. He was so incredibly shy the first time I tried to interact with him, but as soon as he deemed me safe, a bond formed and it nearly broke my heart to leave the place. The idea of ecological consciousness, that “we can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, and love” was definitely demonstrated during my time volunteering. I was fully aware of animal shelters before, but the suffering of these animals never really hit me until I actually spent time there. I am definitely glad that I was given the opportunity to participate in helping out my community and the animals in it.