"I can find humor in almost anything, but one thing I never laugh about is cruelty to animals.  In this wonderful book, Mary Lou Randour reminds us that animals were not put here to endure pain based on our whims."
-- Bill Maher, Politically Incorrect

Mary Lou Randour, Ph.D., PSYETA's program director, is the author of a new book on relationships among human beings and other-than-human animals.
Animal Grace: Entering a Spiritual Relationship with Our Fellow Creatures
packs an enormous amount of thought, anecdote, and careful documentation into
its 167 pages.  Building on such compelling and informative books as Gary Kowalski's The Souls of Animals, Susan McElroy's Animals as Teachers and Healers (Susan provided a foreword to Animal Grace), and other writing about animals' minds, emotions, and  spirituality and on thousands of years of religious and philosophical traditions, Mary Lou's book takes readers an important step further.
 

Ask What You Can Do for Animals 

Authors have previously done their best to explain other-than-human animals' inner lives; some have described benefits to human beings of relationships with animals; and some have revealed scriptural and philosophical bases for humane rather than abusive or  tyrannical treatment of animals.  Mary Lou delves into those matters and explains them clearly and succinctly, but her main point is how entering into spiritual relationships with animals can benefit animals and humans and, ultimately, life itself.  Thus, her book is not only about awareness but action as a necessary part of spiritual development.

Awareness of animals as individual conscious beings with specific biological needs, mental processes, and souls brings responsibility for acting so as to nurture animals as total beings a la Homo sapiens sapiens.  So acting can involve personal practices like eating only foods not derived from animal exploitation or using only personal care products not tested on animals.  It can also involve publicly opposing the killing of deer in suburbs--one of Mary Lou's examples from her own life--or other acts of protest.  Entering into a spiritual relationship with other-than-human animals may or may not involve interacting with animals directly, but for many, personal relationships with animals open the door to further growth.

"I am hoping to accomplish two things with my book," says Mary Lou, "to awaken people who are 'spiritually inclined' but who haven't thought much about how their actions affect animals and to offer some source of--what?--solace to animal rights activists who, on too regular a basis, have to contend with all kinds of atrocities.  And they are atrocities, for the most part, which are not only sanctioned by society, but often paid for with our tax dollars.  I think we can get a kind of post-traumatic stress syndrome, too, and that it can wear out our souls.  My impetus for writing
the book was to try to develop some kind of internal resource so that I could deal with the grief and rage I regularly feel in this work."
 

Author's Awakening

Mary Lou's introduction to the book begins, "Until very recently I never quite understood what 'grace' meant, though I certainly heard it often used in the Episcopal church in which I was raised.   Grace seemed to be the key--perhaps not the only one, but certainly one of the most
important--to entering a spiritual life.  It was a key, however, I could not find."  She explains how learning about cruel animal testing in the cosmetics industry, cruel animal experiments in biomedical laboratories, and other abuses of animals throughout our society led her  to consider animals'
well-being much more often until doing so became her habit and her basis for many personal choices.

"As my awareness developed, the animals taught me that my decisions affected them."  This connection among perception, awareness, and action forms the basis of spirituality.  "When we divide ourselves by denying, avoiding, repressing, or disassociating, we weaken our psychological
capacity.  It takes psychic energy to not know, or to not care, or to not act.  When we allow ourselves to know, care, and act, we release energy, making it available for the growth and nurturance of our psychological and spiritual selves."
 

Beyond Perception and Awareness

Personal narrative doesn't make up the entire book, however.  In chapters titled "What Animals Can Teach Us about Spirituality" and "Entering a Spiritual Relationship with Animals," Mary Lou relates anecdotes involving other peopl's observations of and experiences with  animals--experiences that belie long-entrenched misconceptions minimizing animals' emotional and spiritual depth.  We see that our society's billions of animal victims are more than mere bodies and nervous systems unjustifiably made to suffer: They are complete beings, spiritual beings.  They "offer us a unique opportunity to transcend the boundaries of our human perspectives; they allow us to stretch our consciousness toward understanding what it is to be different. This stretching enables us to grow beyond our narrow viewpoint.  It allows us, I believe, to gain a spiritual advantage.  How can we possibly appreciate and move toward spiritual wholeness if we cannot see beyond our own species? How can we come to know God, or grasp the interconnectedness of all life, if
we limit ourselves to knowing only our own kind?"

After briefly summarizing how individual human beings grow through experience, especially through familial and other interpersonal relationships, she explains how animals, with their innocence and the suffering human beings inflict on them, enter into the spiritual picture. "We can redefine our relationship so as to end all of the needless suffering of animals who are used to test cosmetics or medicine, or who become antibiotic- and hormone-ridden food after unbearable confinement in the
endless crates of factory farms.  We can say 'no' to participating in that kind of relationship.  More than saying 'no' we are declaring an even more resounding yes!  It is a yes to life and to the incredible wonder of creation.  It is a yes to falling in love with the world around us--to becoming enchanted by the unity of existence."

Having touched on relevant aspects of major religions in the early chapters, in "The Peaceable Kindom" (a resonant play on the Peaceable Kingdom) Mary Lou illustrates, by detailing life at animal sanctuaries, current manifestations of spirituality extended to animals and many species
peacefully coexisting.  Poplar Springs, in Poolesville, Maryland, receives the most copy because Mary Lou visited that sanctuary in preparing the book. She also mentions the legendary Farm Sanctuary (Watkins Glen, New York, and Orland, California) and Pigs A Sanctuary (Charles Town, West Virginia).

Ancient Precedents
 

In "The New Kashrut: The Spiritual Depth of Vegetarianism" and "Ahimsa: Cultivating Nonviolence Toward Animals," the reader finds teachings of Judaism, Christianity, Jainism, and other religious systems exhorting us to treat animals compassionately.  Though this message is central to Jainism, in the Western religions it has too often been suppressed.  Dualistic thinking of recent centuries has heaped on layers of misinterpretation and denial.  Yet reading God's giving humans "dominion" over the other animals, in Genesis, as license to tyrannize and abuse them is inconsistent with the same book's menu for humans: "every herb, seed and green thing."  The book's engaging and succinct discussions of scripture should enable followers of established religions to open their hearts to animals.  If you think you should eat meat or shampoo your hair with an animal-tested gel, it isn't because the Bible tells you so.  The Bible says the opposite, as Mary Lou helps us to see.  Both text and endnotes should help even skeptics to see that many theologians and biblical scholars agree.
 

Animal Grace Manifest

Two highly original chapters of Animal Grace are the last two before the epilogue in which Mary Lou resumes her personal narrative, expanding on her own experience using material from the middle chapters to elaborate.  In "The Parallel Worlds of Human and Nonhuman Animals," "you will meet Eve, who like many of us strives to be good and spiritually responsible, and to instill meaning in her life.  For one short day we will observe Eve through the perspective of two parallel worlds: the one she occupies as she goes about her daily life, making many of the ordinary decisions all of us make; and the lesser known world of the animals whose lives are affected by her decisions."  Eve is "not aware of the animal world" when we first meet her.  She is 55 years old, has been married for 30 years, has two grown children and some grandchildren, and has weathered typical difficulties with her family over the years.

Soon we see Eve taking Premarin, the prescription menopause drug made with urine collected in containers irritatingly attached to thousands of mares kept standing on concrete in tiny stalls for months on end.  Then it's on to animal-tested toothpaste, soap, makeup, fur trim on the hood of her
parka, the flesh of a pig for dinner, and other cruelly obtained products that make up her day.  Mary Lou provides a description of the cruelty involved in producing each product.  Later, Eve finds herself disturbed but cannot yet understand why.  She is beginning to experience a spiritual
awakening such as Animal Grace suggests we all are capable of having if we will allow ourselves to become aware of other-than-human animals--not just of their presence or of their cuteness but of their beingness and the unnecessary suffering to which our species subjects them.
 

Animal Grace Can Be Yours

Lest we spoil your thrill of discovery, we won't disclose, in these pages, many fascinating and illuminating occurrences and ideas Mary Lou describes to illustrate the principle of animal grace and the desirability of entering into a spiritual relationship with animals.  It becomes more than
clear as one reads, however, that the benefits accrue, not only to individuals whose awareness, love, and compassionate action cross long-imagined boundaries between human and other-than-human beings, but also to animals directly or indirectly touched, other human beings, and an infinitely expanding universe of beings beyond the individual's direct knowledge.

One of this book's many accomplishments is that it makes concepts often considered abstract and esoteric comprehensible and even palpable to ordinary readers.  Experienced animal advocates are sure to find it informative and uplifting, and it is bound to remove many sets of earplugs we
might have thought had been permanently grafted into place.

You can order Animal Grace: Entering a Spiritual Relationship with Our Fellow Creatures from PSYETA.

Between 1,500 and 2,000 chimpanzees are currently kept in U.S. laboratories.  Far more rats, mice, birds, dogs, and other animals are exploited in biomedical research, but chimpanzees' close similarities to human beings and the very high cost of caring for them--even in barren boxes,
hanging on to lives dull beyond imagining--have brought hope that they might get a "hands off" from the vivisection industry.  In recent years, laboratory personnel have not killed chimpanzees to limit their populations, despite their practice of killing other animals for that puspose.  Most have reduced or eliminated breeding programs.

Following a National Institutes of Health (NIH)-requested Institute for Laboratory Animal Research (ILAR) investigation of issues regarding laboratory uses of chimpanzees, the National Research Council (NRC) published ILAR's recommendations in July 1997.  In addition to not killing animals for population control, ILAR's recommendations include a five-year breeding moratorium on chimpanzees (1997 to 2001); assuring lifetime support and ownership by the federal government of a "core population" of about 1,000 chimpanzees; making capable sanctuaries part of a plan "to achieve the best and most cost-effective solution to the current dilemma"; establishing a Chimpanzee Management Program (ChiMP) in the Office of the Director of NIH with responsibility for "government-owned animals considered necessary to meet current and long-term national needs"; and creating an "appropriate advisory council of nongovernment experts" to establish ChiMP policies  including "implications for research use, breeding-colony size, demography,
genetics, and long-term care."

A key reason NIH asked ILAR to study the chimpanzees' situation and the NRC subsequently recommended a breeding moratorium was the NIH breeding program of the late 1980s to provide chimpanzees for human immunodeficiency virus research.  More were born than experimenters then chose to use, so a "surplus" came to exist.

Based on the NRC recommendations, NIH, through the National Center for Research Resources ("resources" here unfortunately means animals), established the above-mentioned ChiMP, which you can access  at  http://www.ncrr.nih.gov/compmed/916chimp.htm.   The NIH program may make it more difficult for chimpanzees to receive the lifelong care as fully entitled beings, with an absolute guarantee against exploitation and invasive experiments, that PSYETA and other animal advocates demand.
 

To Know Them Is To Love Them

Chimpanzees' reasoning and communication abilities and their genetic, anatomical, and behavioral closeness to Homo sapiens sapiens, and familiarity with and empathy for them thanks to public
education (especially the renowned work of Dr. Jane Goodall) help explain chimpanzees' being singled out.  So do a UK ban of experiments on them, reports from the Fauna Foundation and other sanctuaries about their personalities, expressiveness, social interactions, and problems due to
long-term isolation and other abuses in laboratories (see Chimpanzees Rehabilitated at the Fauna Foundation).  Some scientists' attachments to them and reluctance to euthanize them and In Defense of Animals' & Last Chance for Animals' reports of deeply troubling abuse and neglect causing the deaths of some chimpanzees at The Coulston Foundation--by far the largest U.S. facility conducting experiments on them, holding hundreds in its cages--add to the momentum toward lifelong care based on chimpanzees' individual needs rather than continued laboratory exploitation or warehousing as if they were objects and not beings.

The movement to provide such care for chimpanzees "retired" from laboratories has strengthened in recent years. The Chimpanzee Health Improvement, Maintenance, and Protection (CHIMP) Act, introduced by U.S. Representative James Greenwood (R-PA) and 21 cosponsors in 1999, a revised
version of the Postresearch Chimpanzee Care Act introduced in 1998 byGreenwood and Newt Gingrich (R-GA), has provided a specific legislative measure some advocates support.  The National Chimpanzee Task Force, a coalition of animal protection organizations, has promoted the bill.  The CHIMP Act would establish a private nonprofit organization to administer a retirement program,  standards for care, and a method for bringing chimpanzees into sanctuaries.
 

Serious Commitment Needed

Caring for chimpanzees properly is a very serious long-term undertaking.  They need large quantities of fresh fruit, adequate space to move about, play, socialize and find privacy, and health care--sometimes for serious emotional difficulties resulting from confinement, isolation, and other abuses and sometimes for injuries or HIV, hepatitis or other infectious diseases or conditions inflicted on them in experiments.  They live long lives--often into their 60s.

Nor can chimpanzees be shipped to Africa and  released.  It is widely agreed that chimpanzees who have lived much or all of their lives in captivity do not have the necessary knowledge, skills, mental and physical health, or family groups integrated into their natural habitat to thrive where they would have lived had human beings not captured them or their ancestors.  In addition, habitat destruction and the killing of chimpanzees and other apes for "bushmeat"--thousands  are expected to be killed this year--make the animals' native continent less safe than it used to be.

In 1999, the Humane Society of the United States organized meetings that included representatives of other animal protection organizations and of zoos, research facilities, and the NIH.  This diverse group agreed on the need to find economical chimpanzee housing and to obtain federal support for
new sanctuaries for chimpanzees.  There was disagreement on whether sanctuaries should allow research of any kind, whether they should give researchers biological samples and/or records, and what some sanctuary standards should be.
 

Toward the Future

U.S. researchers began studying chimpanzees early in the 20th century.  Their exploitation expanded to include a wide range of invasive experiments, and chimpanzees  were forced to proceed human beings into "outer space." PSYETA supports an end to all invasive research using animals.  We
believe that, should all "retired" chimpanzees receive the care they deserve from skilled and deeply committed sanctuary caregivers, the world will be that much better and the way will be paved for other animals to be treated with compassion, not maintained for human purposes.  It is PSYETA's hope that, by the time the 21st century has progressed far, we will be able to inform you
that chimpanzee exploitation is on the course of extinction and that the care of chimpanzees in captivity is strictly for their own individual well-being.