The Samples "African Ivory"

This week our guest blogger is Scott Lajoie, who has substituted for me before as editor of Cape Cod Magazine. Now a writer with the International Fund for Animal Welfare in Yarmouth Port, Scott is writing about songs addressing animal welfare issues of today. 

The 90s alternative jam reggae band The Samples, a long-time fave of mine (in fact, I mentioned them the last time I guest-blogged), produced a lot of songs with socially conscious lyrics about the environment. I read them now and they sound a little corny:

Nature, it's all around me
Nature is so astounding
Puts me on a beach
Swims beneath the sea
It's never out of reach
It's even you and me

In the last two months, however, the song “African Ivory” has become very real to me, especially the two lines, There's a rhinoceros horn on our big TV and There's an elephant tusk on our big TV.
These lines address two of the worst products of wildlife trafficking, rhino horn and elephant ivory, both of which are horrendously sawed off the face of these charismatic megafauna after they are poached. Tusk and horn are not like wool or discarded antlers, folks; the elephants and rhinos must be killed to harvest it.

Along with human trafficking, drug running and illegal arms sales, wildlife crime—which includes a whole host of wildlife “derivatives” too numerous to mention—ranks among the most serious, dangerous, and damaging of international crimes, worth an estimated US $19 billion per year as noted in IFAW’s  “Criminal Nature – The Global Security Implications of the Illegal Wildlife Trade.”

As I write this on Monday, we at IFAW are lauding the ivory crush in Guangzhou, China. For those of you who are not familiar with a crush, it is a symbolic gesture on the part of a government to pulverize ivory. By doing so, it brings exposure to the poaching of elephants, the illegal trafficking of material across borders, and the conflicted morality of purchasing and even owning ivory. (For a very personal account of the latter, read True Blood actress Kristin Bauer’s blog on the topic.)

IFAW works everyday to address the myriad issues related to this often overlooked type of crime. It’s rarely on your “big TV.”

Band leader and song writer Sean Kelly posted a video for an acoustic version recently with a note:
Published on Jan 15, 2013:

In the mid eighties I saw a documentary on the severity of the poaching of Elephants for their ivory tusks and Rhinoceros for their horns. I had a helpless and nauseous feeling in my stomach and soul.
All this information was coming through my TV set. I wrote this song back in 1988 or 89 and as you can see from this article, sadly nothing has changed in regard to the sadistic need for a frickin bone!!!!

sean

The version I post here is of the original.


Hear the song on Youtube.

Neko Case "The Tigers Have Spoken"

This week our guest blogger is Scott Lajoie, who has substituted for me before as editor of Cape Cod Magazine. Now a writer with the International Fund for Animal Welfare in Yarmouth Port, Scott is writing about songs addressing animal welfare issues of today.

They shot the tiger on his chain
In a field behind the cages
He walked in circles 'til he was crazy
And he lived that way forever
And he lived that way beside them,
Separate from the other tigers
He did not know another tiger.

We know them as one of the magnificent big cats. Ferocious. Powerful. Royal. With probably the most recognizable markings on the planet.

But tigers are facing enormous threats. Their natural habitat is diminishing. Poachers pursue them for the beautiful coats. There is a market for tiger bone wine, a tonic used in traditional Chinese medicine.

Perhaps you don’t know that one major issue in the welfare of tigers is a domestic one. There are more tigers in private ownership here in America than there are in their natural wild habitat in China and Russia.

While some living quarters are fitting, others are woefully inadequate, the “trophy” cats living in squalid conditions. What’s more, when these cats break free, they present a horrible safety risk in the surrounding community. Remember the breakout in Ohio?

Each year, some of these tigers are given up and relocated to a number of sanctuaries across the country. Others are not so lucky.

Neko Case tackled this issue back in 2004 with her song, The Tigers Have Spoken. It is haunting ode with cool guitar effects to the isolated life and tragic death of one such tiger.



Hear the song on Youtube.

The Police "King Of Pain"

This week our guest blogger is Scott Lajoie, who has substituted for me before as editor of Cape Cod Magazine. Now a writer with the International Fund for Animal Welfare in Yarmouth Port, Scott is writing about songs addressing animal welfare issues of today.

I was obsessed with Synchronicity when it was released in 1983. Granted, I was only 10, but it proved to be pretty prescient as I still consider the album one of the greatest of all time.

The song King of Pain described phenomena of the natural world we humans perceive to be horribly tragic. Two lines stand out to me now because the non-profit for which I work, the International Fund for Animal Welfare, specifically addresses these issues.

There's a blue whale beached by a springtime's ebb.

Blue whales rarely beach themselves. The problem of stranding comes mostly with smaller whales (pilots) and dolphins. I wrote about IFAW’s Marine Mammal Rescue and Research team, the group that rushes out to the flats to attend to these creatures, when I was still with Cape Cod Magazine. We do not know why whales and dolphins strand, but we are learning about potential factors, including the overwhelming amount of noise with which we humans have polluted the ocean.

"There's a red fox torn by a huntsman's pack."

I really wasn’t very aware of what this line meant until I learned specifically about the fox hunt in Britain. IFAW has campaigned for years against this cruel “sport,” in which hounds led by a hunter descend on a chased fox and literally rip the animal apart. Another rock star has joined the fight against this practice: Brian May of Queen. Although it has been officially banned in the UK, hunters still engage in it under authorities’ radar. IFAW, however, has sponsored observer teams to follow these hunters into the woods and document their actions.



Hear the song on Youtube.

PFR "Goldie's Last Day"

This was the subject of some future Weekend Post.

Though I never heard it anywhere else, this one was a semi-frequent request at the station I worked at in the mid-90s in Virginia.

At the time I had always thought it was pretty dang goofy.  Writing about your dog dying under mysterious circumstances and throwing in a bit of Taps struck me as ridiculous.

A few years later, a friend of mine had her dog poisoned, and the goofiness of the song was undercut by the realness of that incident.

I mention this story because this week, I'm turning over the blog to my friend Scott Lajoie, who is now making his life's work about the concern for animal welfare.  

While it's easy to make light (or be like Nelson Muntz on The Simpsons and suggest we "Nuke The Whales"), there is important work to be done, and important issues to consider.  It is pretty impressive that right on Cape Cod, there is a worldwide-ranging organization working to protect and preserve rights for animals, and bring awareness to issues much larger, including the fur and ivory trade for instance.

Musicians have been bringing awareness to these topics in their songs for many, many years, and Scott will highlight a few of them, and talk about the organization he works for, The International Fund For Animal Welfare.

And if you still need to make thing light, when you say IFAW, you can say it like Nelson Muntz says "HAW-Haw!"

Hear the song on Youtube.