The May-June Peaceable Table is now online

[Gracia Fay Ellwood]

Dear Friends of Animals,

• The Glimpse of the Peaceable Kingdom features a family or otters and an orangutan (one of three) who have formed a fast friendship, and play games together.
• The Guest Editorial Essay, "A Gigantic Library," is an excerpt from Friend Les Mitchell's recent book Reading the Animal Text in the Landscape of the Damned.  He discusses, among other things the euphemistic language of exploitation, and shows how signs of animal abuse appear in many places in our everyday world, seldom recognized for what they are.
• One of the NewNotes reports that three pro-animal organizations are offering grants to animal agriculturalists to enable them to shift to plant ag.
• An Unset Gem from T.S. Eliot, "Human kind cannot bear very much reality"--makes the reader more aware of something we already know half-consciously.
• Tokugawa Tsunayoshi, the Pioneer in this issue, was a Shogun of seventeeth-century Japan who promulgated laws protecting animals, even forbidding their killing.  Unsurprisingly, the aristocrats objected to this interference with their violent sports, and blackened his name.
• Inside Animal Hearts and Minds by Belinda Recio is Reviewed by Robert Ellwood.  This wonderful book, with many appealing photos, describes many surprising facts about animal achievements, such as singing for sheer pleasure, talking (with specific vocabularies), and tool-making.  A must-read.
• You'll love the Raspberry Pie in this month's Recipe, which can be topped with vegan whipped cream and garnished with more raspberries. Yum!
• The Poetry selection, "The Bells of Heaven," is one we featured several years ago.  It appears again because it picks up a reference in the Editorial Essay.

To read in this issue, go to http://www.vegetarianfriends.net/issue161.html.

Toward the Peaceable Kingdom,

Gracia Fay Ellwood
Editor

"You must treat the foreigner living among you as native-born and love him as yourself, for you were foreigners in the land of Egypt." --Lev. 19:34