Pebbles spent eight years bearing litters at a Minnesota puppymill, before being sold at the Ohio Dog Auction. Photo by Konstantin Vasserman.

We’ve got three ‘02-model females,” the auctioneer began.

A seated crowd of bonnets and wide-brim hats peered down into the auction pit, where three small white dogs stood on a rug-covered table. A teenage boy held each one in place.

In lots 73-75, three Bichon Frises registered under the names Mandy, Crystal, and Pebbles were shaking.

Maybe they felt cold, or maybe they felt scared. It was a January morning, their curls had been shorn off and until that moment they had been tasked with bearing litters of puppies in a large breeding facility known for its small cages, where they had probably never felt so many human eyes upon them.

Mandy’s ears froze into an odd crimp, as the auctioneer announced the starting price for her. There were no takers. The price dropped, then dropped again several times, and he gave up. Crystal, a runt, fared the same. The third, Pebbles, whose short legs bowed awkwardly around her tomato-shaped body, fetched a single bid: $5.

The three mothers were among 301 dogs who rode 900 miles last January inside cage-stacked semi tractor-trailer trucks, from Clearwater Kennel in Cushing, Minn., to the Farmerstown Sale Barn in the Amish town of Baltic, Ohio.

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Photo by Cameron Knight

In preparing to interview newly elected Cincinnati City Councilman P.G. Sittenfeld, I was repeatedly visited by the temptation to ask him, “Are you as squeaky-clean as you seem?”

I listened to him, then 25 years old, deliver a bright-eyed, five-minute distillation of a book he was writing on happiness, onstage at the Know Theatre. Later that year he began to frequent a café where I worked.  He was impeccably warm, courteous and dapper as I served his business lunches and coffee, and I wondered what he was all about.

For one thing, I find, Sittenfeld is all about writing. If any hint of a dark side reveals itself, it’s while he scrambles to think of a character from literature that he identifies with.

“Oh, man … I think it’s one of those things where, you know, you fall in love with characters despite their imperfections sometimes,” he muses, giving a shout-out to John Milton’s imagining of a certain charismatic underworld figure in his 1667 epic poem, Paradise Lost. 

After more thought, he decides on someone less controversial: James of Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach.

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Illustration by Rebecca Sylvester for CityBeat

A series of 12 unusual earthquakes in northern Ohio reached a 4.0 magnitude on New Year’s Eve, shaking homes in Youngstown and intensifying nationwide opposition to fracking, a controversial natural gas extraction process.

John Armbruster, a Columbia University seismologist hired by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR), located the quakes’ epicenters near the base of a wastewater injection well operated by D&L Energy. One of 177 injection wells in Ohio, this one was greasing the palms of a previously unknown fault line, by pumping gas industry wastewater right into it.

In response to the finding, Gov. John Kasich suspended injections at that well and at four inactive sites in the same area.

Those injection wells dispose of wastewater generated by fracking wells, whose job it is to extract natural gas by blasting pressurized slurries of water, chemicals and sand into ancient shale formations, thousands of feet below ground.

Although it hasn’t been known to cause earthquakes, fracking — or horizontal hydraulic fracturing — creates its own problems. Ask Thelma Payne.

Ms. Payne, now 88, and her husband Richard Payne, 91, were asleep in their bed one night in December 2007, when an explosion in their basement blew their Geauga County home straight off its foundations. The couple bounced up and landed safely back on their mattress; the house landed back on its foundation, but was damaged beyond repair.

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SAEN co-founders Karen and Michael Budkie. Photo courtesy of Dina Kourda

“That’s not exactly the Sunday comics,” says the 52-year-old from Milford, who has a degree in Animal Health Technology from the University of Cincinnati, and another in Theology from Xavier University.

After poring through medical histories and U.S. Department of Agriculture reports, Mr. Budkie, his wife Karen Budkie, 52, and a small investigative team comprising the nonprofit Stop Animal Exploitation Now (SAEN) aim their stones at several Goliaths of American industry.

Their goals: Hold accountable the defense, pharmaceutical and medical industries for their violations of the Animal Welfare Act. And let the public know what happens in animal labs.

In October SAEN unearthed records showing that a dozen musk oxen had died of starvation at a University of Alaska research facility. And last month the group released a list of the 20 U.S. research facilities that subject the greatest number of animals to painful experiments without anesthesia. In the middle of this list is Battelle Memorial Institute, a Columbus-based nonprofit company that does contract work for the Department of Defense (DOD), among others.

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Foam-rubber animals filled Ortekay Square in Istanbul, Turkey last year, in a public art project inspired by the feral dogs & cats, gulls, & dolphins who share the city.

Last night I felt a glimmer of insight into the nascent, boundary-straining field of zooethnography.   It came as a relief, as I had arrived in Sweden’s old university town of Uppsala for a conference on it four days earlier.  After staying in bed sick for the second of the conference’s two days, I feared I’d lost my chance to clue in.

Thankfully, conference organizer Jacob Bull and one presenter, Eva Hayward, each took time later in the week to help chase away my lingering confusion.

Both of them are members of the “HumAnimal” group at Uppsala University’s Center for Gender Research–a group which over the past year has embraced the term and field of zooethnography, and begun to define its challenges.

As I understand it, zooethnography is the study of how animals shape human-animal encounters.  Like traditional ethnographers, zooethnographers study these encounters in light of the cultural environments in which they occur–like a particular research lab, city park, or farm.

On Monday Hayward presented one such study, Migrations of Light: Whale songs and Photographs, in which she built an understanding of how humpback whales affected a group of human researchers in Maine, through photographs of the whale’s flukes.

In sense-soaked language that barely felt like prose, Hayward explained how the whales impressed their movement, weight, texture, ebullience, sociality, and even their songs into the senses of the researchers, through the physical medium of archived photographs.

I struggled with the impression that Hayward saw these whales as somehow concerned with the outcome of their fluke portraits, though she took care to disavow that notion.

Thankfully, the fog burned away in later conversations.  Zooethnographic research does not assume that animals are quietly manipulating our relationships (though cat guardians might be willing to go that far), but simply that they are active participants–not passive instruments–in their interactions with humans.  And as active participants, their bodies, movements, feelings, and ways of understanding the world all help to co-create the “more-than-human” cultures they live in with us.

Imagine how different the culture might be of a cat park, compared to a dog park, even if the same group of humans were at its sidelines.  (Hm, Google reveals that an abundance of satire journalists have already tried to imagine such a culture.)

Few of us would probably question the idea that animals affect us.  Our companion animals change the form and content of our lives in every way, causing comfort, frustration, smells, new ideas, and walks down the street.  The darting motions of mice or spiders elicit terror in some people.  And the experience of eating meat depends upon the physiological, hormonal, and social experiences of the animal who became that meat.

But, just as human laws have been slow to refine the legal status of animals as property (more on that next week!), research methods have likewise been slow to include animals’direct contributions to culture.

Species differences in communication make it no small feat to understand how multispecies cultures should be studied, and Bull is careful to say that HumAnimal is not presenting zooethnography as a new methodology, but as an invitation:

“To take what Derrida refers to as The Animal Question, to methodology. To say that if we’re going to take other animals seriously, then we must also question how we are taking them seriously, and what are the significances and impacts of speaking for them, speaking with them, speaking nearby to animals.”

The HumAnimal group is currently working on a kind of declaration for zooethnography which addresses, among other problems, the need to handle constructively the twin human habits of anthropocentrism (viewing the world through a human-centered lens) and anthropomorphism (attributing seemingly “human” characteristics to non-humans).

To follow the continued unfolding of this group’s questions and research, I recommend visiting this page on their web site.

Screen shot of protestors at Piatt Park, shortly before 1am on October 21. Livestream at www.livestream.com/occupycincy

After midnight this morning, Cincinnati police arrested about twenty members of Occupy Cincinnati before a crowd of several hundred supporters, according to eyewitnesses.

The growing group of residents had been demonstrating against a system of “corporate welfare”–exemplified by the bank bailouts of 2008 and 2009–that they say tramples the interests of 99 percent of the U.S. population, while catering to the demands of the wealthiest and most politically influential one percent.

About twenty members of the non-violent, democratically-run group were arrested and their tents dismantled, four days after the movement filed a federal injunction against the City for the $105 tickets repeatedly issued to each occupier, nightly since the demonstration began.

One occupier, who was running the livestream, said police behaved respectfully during the arrests.

“Even though they’re following unlawful orders, they’ve been very polite the whole time.” he said.

“They didn’t come in riot gear, they didn’t drag people around, they just escorted them onto the bus.”

According to the demonstrator addressing the livestream at the moment of this writing (who may have identified himself earlier during the feed) those arrested were taken to the Price Hill police station in District 3.

To follow the protest through its own eyes, visit http://www.livestream.com/occupycincy

Horses driven through Prague with a tourist carriage

I am rolling out of Dresden on a quiet train, halfway between Prague’s ICAS conference on “Reconfiguring the ‘Human’/'Animal’Binary” and Berlin, where I’ll spend a night before flying to Sweden for tomorrow’s “Zooethnographies” papers.  It has been a gorgeous weekend, filled with sun and busty wood pigeons.

In the old, wood-and-light-filled Faculty of Arts at Prague’s Charles University, most of the 50+ presenters directly addressed the meeting’s theme: finding more nuanced and constructive new ways to look at human-animal relationships.

Existing “binary” notions like master-pet, hunter-quarry, consumer-resource, and intellectual-instinctual, were dismantled or dismissed for many of the same reasons that Gender Studies scholars have fought against the limitations wrought by using crude dichotomies like “virgin/whore” to define a person.

The quotation marks inside the conference’s title nod to the imprecision of defining ourselves in opposition to animals, as many doctrines have done, when we in fact are animals.

Czech philosopher Radim Belohrad gave a particularly lucid challenge to the idea that our most “essential” defining traits are those that distinguish us from other animals, in his paper titled “Are We More Than Animals?  In Defense of the Biological Theory of Personal Identity.”  While we can continue to exist even after losing our human qualities like language or self-reflection, he argued, if we lose our animal qualities like life and metabolism, we cease to exist.  According to Belohrad we are essentially animals–and people only incidentally.

Within the conference’s loose framework of questioning the human-animal boundary, I heard two specific themes arise, both of which aimed in different ways to clarify the work of animal protection activists.

Several scholars tried to build coherent arguments for why animal activists should either intervene or step away, when they see violence among other animals.   And many others sought a key to unlock the mystery of human indifference to animal cruelty.

Responding to violence in “nature”

“Innocent Threats and the Moral Problem of Carnivorous Animals” was philosopher Rainer Ebert’s relentless sequence of logical syllogisms, which aimed to poke a hole in animal rights pillar Tom Regan’s claim that we are obligated to protect prey animals.  Ethicists Cátia Faria and Beril Sözmen wrestled with the same problem in their joint paper “Resisting Violence in Nature,” given their commitment to intervene on behalf of both humans and animals in any other situation of violence.

And after a gruesomely fascinating discussion of the arguments for technological “animal enhancement” in the service of humans (like the human-milk-producing cows debuted by the China Agriculture University this summer), tech ethicist Arianna Ferrari examined one philosopher’s call to attack the other end of violence, by engineering pain-free humans and animals.  Ferrari’s work was titled “Resisting the Rhetoric of Animal Enhancement.”

On human indifference to violence

The efforts to understand indifference/complicity in violence toward animals were so dense and challenging for me, that I will list those papers now, but return later in the week to revisit my video footage and try to understand how the insights of these three talks may bear on one another:

“How is it possible to explain people’s indifference towards the violence against animals?”  by Marcel Sebastian

“Affective Dimensions of the Animal Industrial Complex in Derrida’s ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’” by Richard Twine

“Discursive Analysis of the Objectification of Laboratory Animals in the Czech Republic” by Teresa Vandrovcová.

Signing off from Uppsala,

Fabien.

A retriever awaits his human, outside of a pharmacy in central Prague.

Beneath the sooty spires of Prague, dogs join men and women in restaurants, birds arrive to winter on the iceless Vlatva River, and a group of scholars is meeting to ask questions that I, too, would like answered:

Left to his own devices, what kind of life might a domestic dog choose for himself?

How do people protect their psyches, in jobs that demand violence against animals?

How relevant are the differences between humans and non-humans?

Across Europe this month, experts in animal law, zooethnography, and other areas of the young field known as human-animal studies (HAS), are convening to share and build ideas.  Having recently studied human-animal relations in my own grad program, I’ve decided to come along and mull through the most useful and interesting insights I hear, for a general audience.  The language of scholars can be flummoxingly high falutin, so I want to see if I can do for these ideas what Scientific American does for astrochemistry.

I plan to write a short article here, each day for the next three weeks; to stay tuned, you can subscribe to Sentient Cincinnati (by hitting the “follow” button at the top or bottom of this page), or keep your eye on my Twitter account.

My journey begins here in Prague with perhaps the most radical wing of HAS scholars, the Institute for Critical Animal Studies (ICAS).  Many of these scholars dedicate their work to the liberation of animals from human coercion, blurring lines between scholarship and activism.  Conference organizer Tereza Vandorovcová likens the activist bent of critical animal studies, to that of gender studies:

More after tomorrow’s 23 talks and one vigil–thanks for reading!

Smokestacks at Duke Energy's Miami Fort Plant in North Bend, Ohio

In a move almost as confusing as its monthly bills, Duke Energy has proposed a 10-year rate plan that would impose a new “capacity” fee on both its own customers and those who have switched to other electricity providers.

While the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio (PUCO) evaluates the proposal, Cincinnati residents are considering an unrelated ballot measure that would enable them, as a group, to take their business away from Duke and give it to a lower bidder.

Under Duke’s proposal, its customers would now find their energy charges “unbundled” into two components: The cost of generating energy, which only they would pay for; and also Duke’s more hypothetical “capacity” to generate energy, which everyone on the local grid would subsidize through the proposed fee.

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Ellen Bierhorst presides over the final Lloyd House Salon at her Clifton home.

If Cincinnati were Paris, Ellen Bierhorst would be its Gertrude Stein.

In July the 71-year-old psychotherapist-poet ended her Lloyd House Salon, a gathering in Clifton where some of the city’s most engaged citizens grappled with local leaders and each other about politics, art, life and death. Open to anyone and any topic, the salon convened every week “come hell or high water” for 10 years.

Free from the confines of short soundbites, visitors to the salon such as mayors, City Council members and aspiring public servants often used the forum to stump and debate, and Lloyd House “salonistas” relished the chance to cross-examine them around a potluck dinner table.

Longtime salon-goer Steve Sunderland, 71, a professor of peace and educational studies at the University of Cincinnati, remembers a visit from Hamilton County Commissioner David Pepper as emblematic of what made the salon unique.

“He stayed the whole evening, and people had an opportunity to talk to him about what his background was, what his dreams were,” Sunderland says.

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