Pest control for vegans. (It’s complicated.)
By Julia McKinnell - Friday, August 26, 2011 - 7 Comments
Even de-fleaing a dog can be a problem. After all, “fleas are living beings, too.”
Getty Images/Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute
Veganism is all about animal rights, but where do you draw the line if you’re a restaurant owner with a mouse problem, or a cook with cockroaches in the kitchen? According to Martin Mersereau, director of emergency response for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in Washington, “Any vegan restaurant than kills rodents is absolutely hypocritical. If you’re going to exercise such conscientiousness in the cuisine that you prepare, then why not bring that same heart and soul to managing your little unwanted visitors?” Glue traps and poison, he says, “should be avoided like the plague.”
In Toronto, a vegan restaurant owner (who doesn’t want his name used) says, “You’re a vegan as much as you can be. Adequate pest control is a requirement of the Toronto Board of Health. We’re in Kensington Market. There are mice everywhere, so we have a service that comes by, and they put out a lot of glue traps. But I’ve actually caught a mouse on a glue trap and you can release them from the trap using oil. You put oil on the parts the mouse is stuck to, any kind of cooking oil, and it loosens the adhesive. You take him outside. It takes five minutes. The tricky part is, if their head is stuck to the glue trap you have to make sure you don’t drown the little guy in oil.”
In Victoria, at the Lotus Pond, a Buddhist restaurant serving vegan food, chef and part-owner Charles Cai says, “I’m Buddhist. I’ve never killed anything. Never, never, never. How do we solve it when we have a mouse? The best way is to block the holes,” he says. “The old buildings always have problems with holes. We’ve found over 10 holes in the last couple of years, but there’s not any mice now.” Occasionally, when customers enter, a bee flies in the door, in which case Cai traps the insect with a small homemade net and releases it back outside.
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What can Buddhism teach Tiger Woods?
By Philippe Gohier - Friday, February 19, 2010 at 7:51 PM - 26 Comments
Woods says his redemption includes going back to his Buddhist roots
Tiger Woods isn’t in the habit of revealing much about his personal life. Even when he was apologizing for the string of affairs that landed him in “inpatient therapy,” the golf superstar let it be known he wouldn’t be going into the nitty-gritty of how he plans to make it up to his wife, Elin Nordegen, nor would he let everyone in on the extent of his romantic conquests.“I understand the press wants to ask me for the details and the times I was unfaithful,” Woods said. “I understand people want to know whether Elin and I will remain together. Please know that as far as I’m concerned, every one of these questions and answers is a matter between Elin and me. These are issues between a husband and a wife.”
The one detail Tiger did want to share with the public is that his quest for redemption will follow the long American tradition of including a spiritual component. “Part of following this path for me is Buddhism, which my mother taught me at a young age,” he said. “People probably don’t realize it, but I was raised a Buddhist, and I actively practiced my faith from childhood until I drifted away from it in recent years. Buddhism teaches that a craving for things outside ourselves causes an unhappy and pointless search for security. It teaches me to stop following every impulse and to learn restraint.”
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Tigerology Institute, comparative religion department
By Colby Cosh - Saturday, January 9, 2010 at 11:20 PM - 19 Comments
A Beltway colleague attempts a contrarian defence of Fox News panelist Brit Hume, who aroused widespread wrath a week ago by suggesting that troubled Tiger Woods should abandon Buddhism because it doesn’t offer “the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith.” The Hume imbroglio is funny when viewed from the standpoint of the convinced atheist: if you regard the major religions as a buffet of indistinguishably nonsensical self-help regimens, Hume’s “proselytizing” appears no more dangerous than recommending some particular book about sex addiction or suggesting that Tiger go on a program of Graham crackers and cold showers. Hume was asked what he thinks Woods ought to do, and gave his best answer. What is objectionable about this?
We do have a strong social taboo, double-reinforced on television and radio broadcasts, against defaming particular religions. But as Carl Cannon points out, it’s not clear that Hume said anything untruthful or unfair about Buddhism. Every great religion has particular practical strengths, and “forgiveness and redemption” are rightly recognized as very strong suits of Christianity. Buddhism offers no escape from the accounting of accumulated karma: “redemption” is foreign to it. In Buddhism, you can’t declare bankruptcy. You work off your debt, in this life or the next.
If Tiger were choosing a new faith to believe in sincerely starting today, and Christianity and Buddhism were the available choices, he would be crazy to choose the latter and thus take a thousand pounds of karma onto his shoulders at the outset of his spiritual trek. He should obviously take the Get Out of Jail Free card. This is not really how anybody chooses a religion, or it is not supposed to be. We are not supposed to hold beliefs because they are pleasant or convenient or conducive to our happiness: we are supposed to believe that which is true about the world. But if you’ve got a belief to sell to others, as Brit Hume does, it is easier to take the low road. Get ‘em with the “forgiveness” pitch when they’re down! Tell them they can be “born again”! They can talk themselves into the theology and the cosmology and the tall tales later! Perhaps it’s the case that when Christians tell stories about the Devil trying to trick vulnerable humans into signing away their souls, they are projecting their own behaviour onto a fictitious adversary.
The real irony is that if we were choosing a faith for Tiger as a practical guide to his future behaviour, instead of a source of comfort, we might see distinct advantages in Buddhism. The ethical doctrine of the Buddha does not depend on what pleases some divine being; it is founded on the idea that suffering is caused by desire. Does it seem likely that Tiger would argue with that one?
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Radicals vs. Buddha
By Adnan R. Khan - Thursday, June 25, 2009 at 9:40 AM - 1 Comment
Pakistan’s Buddhist heritage is under attack by the Taliban
The irony is as thick as the dust clouds sweeping over the ramshackle Pakistani market town of Takht-i-Bahi. At the hilltop ruins of a first-century Buddhist monastery, Ikram Ali, a local university student, is in the middle of explaining what it is that attracts him to the UNESCO-designated World Heritage Site’s grassy knolls and quiet quadrangles when automatic gunfire rips through the serene vales and gullies. “It’s peaceful up here,” he’d been saying just a few seconds earlier, scanning the horizon in the direction of the Swat Valley. “You can escape all of the noise and stress that goes on down there.” The volley of bullets erupts just as he points down toward the town. A group of villagers can be seen scrambling for cover under a grove of trees. The exchange is brief, lasting five minutes or so, after which the villagers resume their routines. Ali watches the scene with mild amusement. “That kind of thing happens every day around here,” he says with a Buddha-like calm.Across a wide, fertile plain to the north, the black mountains of Malakand Division, including Swat, stretch across the horizon. There, ruins of another sort are a dominant feature—the products of weeks of war that have gripped the Swat Valley and its environs. But up in the hilltop monastery in Takht-i-Bahi, none of that seems particularly relevant. Here, young couples, otherwise forbidden from even speaking to one another, huddle conspiratorially in the shadows of meditation halls, or walk casually through what were once monks’ residences. None of them can tell you much about the prolific history of Buddhism in Pakistan and the role Buddhism once played in bringing peace to a region perennially beset by violence. They can tell you little about Ashoka, the third-century BCE emperor of the Mauryan dynasty of India, who, after witnessing first hand the killing fields of his army’s expansionist campaigns, converted to Buddhism, banned war, and spent the rest of his life actively promoting a Buddhist-inspired program of peace and brotherhood. His story reads like a life lesson in pacifism. The prosperity his empire enjoyed after his conversion is legendary. Some of that legacy remains in Takht-i-Bahi, in the quiet, contemplative moods of people like Ali who come there to clear their minds.
