Animal Rights Prisoner Support

Jonny Ablewhite A5750AH
HMP Hewell, Hewell Lane, Redditch, Worcestershire, B97 6QS.

Birthday: 27th January

Jonny has been inside since September 2005 and is serving 12 years for conspiracy to blackmail the owners of Newchurch guinea pig farm, which has now closed down.

What you can send: SAEs; cheques or postal orders made out to ‘HM Prisons’. Please write Jonny’s name/number and sender details on reverse.

Letter from Jonny, 8th September 2009

My dear vegan friends

I was lately pondering the human condition, in an attempt to cheer up a friend from a bad bout of ‘cosmic meaninglessness’, and remembered a piece I recently wrote about ’altruism’. I decided to rewrite it to make it more accessible and thus to (possibly) cheer anybody else up who may be suffering from a similar attack of mental malaise.

The ’happy clappy’ proselytising premise to this wonderful hypothesis is: “Goodness is in our Genes!”‘Goodness’, in evolutionary and biological terms, is generally referred to as ‘altruism’ (could I be more patronising??) and, shock horror, altruism is embedded in our genes because it offers innumerable organisms many survival and reproductive advantages that lead to that organism’s genetic longevity and therefore success.

In evolutionary terms, I’m talking a species survival rate of hundreds of millions of years – not the measly hundred thousand years our species has been around!Anyhoo, two central categories of altruism have been identified:- ‘Kin altruism’ (see W. D. Hamilton): This manifests in cooperation among the same species to increase a family or groups’ life chances at the potential survival expense of a care-giving individual. e.g. the tireless and sacrificial nurturing of a mother towards her young. You will often see mothers of herding animals jeopardising their own safety by leaving the protection of the herd to protect their struggling calfs. Outside of the direct family kin altruism also manifests in an individual’s selfless behaviour to protect the survival of the group. e.g. a bird’s alarm call can alert the entire flock to a predator’s presence but by drawing attention to itself, it is potentially suicidal! However, this is such a well-tuned defence to predation that the bird rarely gets chomped anyway – so everybody’s happy!

There are countless other examples of such incredibly selfless behaviour in so many species that it defies belief!- ‘Reciprocal altruism’ (see R.L. Trivers): This manifests in cooperative behaviour between completely different species and is based on an evolutionary understanding that ‘You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours’; also known as ‘symbiosis’. There are also loads of examples of this type of inter-species cooperation. e.g. ox-pecker birds and cleaner fish. Cleaner fish are just the most daring of altruistic animals! A larger fish will open its gaping jaws and allow the cleaner fish to peck and feast off parasites, keeping his teeth sparkling and the cleaner fish’s belly full! Many of these cleaners are the same size of its host’s usual prey but altruism dictates that the larger fish do not chomp the cleaners! It’s the perfect underwater anarchist carwash!So altruism is everywhere! Goodness is omnipresent and mutual aid is endemic – an amazing evolutionary principle that works to promote family, herd, flock and total inter-species cooperation!! You just can’t get away from it whatever species you are – you just have to keep reminding yourself that it’s there!!

Obviously therefore altruism is embedded in our species too, as it is in all primate genes, because it’s been genetically inherited through the complete Tree of life: from apes, primates, mammals, tetrapods, vertebrates etc etc. This spans through the evolutionary history of 4 billion years of life on earth, back to those first altruistic acts which offered archaic cells the earliest forms of survival advantage. So, all that the great human visionaries have done (e.g. Kropotkin, Chomsky, Torres, Marx, Gandhi, Bookchin, Buddha, Rousseau, Godwin, Proudhon, the glorious Emma Goldman – and all Vegans of course!) is to vocalise altruism in to an uplifting call for mutual aid and cooperation.

Altruism is omniscient, indestructible and inevitable! It’s such a successful and well-tried out evolutionary tool for sustaining biodiversity that it will always triumph – until a better method of survival evolves, which is clearly not going to happen – at least not for the next four thousand million years!

Brightest Vegan Blessings,Jonny Ablewhite