Surprised that Time did this type of article. It does an excellent job of exposing just how unnatural zoos are. For example, as the quote below says, Elephants in Detroit’s harsh winters. Gee, surprisingly, Elephants, from Africa, don’t do well in biting cold. Here are a couple paragraphs to sum up the article below:
“But the reform movement, say critics, didn't go far enough, and those natural-looking habitats are just an illusion created to enhance the visitors' experience. "From the animals' point of view," says Hancocks, "they are not better than they were when they were in cages. It's all done for theatrics."
“One key consideration was Detroit's harsh winters. Although elephants can tolerate cold weather, standing on snow and ice increases the risk of slipping and falling. The only alternative was to have the animals spend most of the winter months indoors, where hard concrete led to foot problems and boredom. Many zoos, like the one in San Diego, have phased out certain species, like the moose, that do better in other climates. "Bringing cold-weather animals into the warm Southern California climate is a bad business decision and a waste of precious resources," says Larry Killmar, the zoo's deputy director of collections.”
Article:
Who Belongs in the Zoo?
IT MAY BE THAT SOME ANIMALS JUST CAN'T BE KEPT HUMANELY IN CAPTI VITY. ZOOS MAY HAVE TO REINVENT THEMSELVES--ONCE AGAIN
http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/
0,10987,1202920,00.html
By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK
Jun. 19, 2006
Standing alone in a small enclosure, a 21-year-old Asian bull elephant named Billy seems oblivious to the two dozen schoolchildren who press against a chain-link fence to get a closer look. He bobs his massive head up and down and transfers his considerable weight from one side to the other. His trunk unfurls toward the blue plastic cylinder that has been provided for him to play with. Occasionally Billy lumbers over to another part of the yard--his massive gray body, wrinkled skin and billowy, fanlike ears intimidating yet at the same time irresistible. Some of the kids have never been this close to a real, live elephant, and their gasps and laughter convey the consensus: he's cool!
But to animal-rights activists, animal-behavior experts and even some zoo officials, Billy's situation is very uncool. In the wild, elephants roam as much as 30 miles a day, snacking on lush foliage, bathing in water holes and interacting socially with other elephants in groups of up to 20. At the Los Angeles Zoo, Billy has had just under an acre on which to roam. After a $39 million upgrade scheduled for completion in 2009, he will share 3.7 acres (about three football fields) with two companions.
That's generous by today's standards, but critics say it's still too little to give an elephant adequate exercise. Living in such confinement, elephants are prone to arthritis, foot problems and even premature death. Billy's head bobbing, they contend, is typical of elephants in distress and probably results from an inadequate physical environment. "I've come to the conclusion after many years that it is simply not possible for zoos to meet the needs of elephants," asserts David Hancocks, an outspoken zoo consultant and former director of the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle.
He's not alone. Over the past five years, major zoos across the country--San Francisco, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, the Bronx Zoo in New York City--have quietly made the decision to stop exhibiting elephants altogether, some as soon as they can find homes for the animals and others after the deaths of the ones they have. For zookeepers, it's a continuation of a reform movement that began a generation ago and swept through most major U.S. zoos. The old concrete-and-steel cages that resembled prisons for animals are mostly gone. In fact, the cages themselves are mostly gone. The barriers between people and animals today consist largely of moats and unobtrusive ramparts that give the exhibits the feel of miniature wild habitats.
But the reform movement, say critics, didn't go far enough, and those natural-looking habitats are just an illusion created to enhance the visitors' experience. "From the animals' point of view," says Hancocks, "they are not better than they were when they were in cages. It's all done for theatrics."
Hancocks goes further than most zoo professionals would, but there is growing agreement that zoos are on the verge of yet another wave of transformation. This time the question is whether some animals--not just elephants but also giraffes, bears and others--belong in zoos at all. "On the one hand," says Ron Kagan, executive director of the Detroit Zoological Society, "people want to see the signature animals like elephants, gorillas and giraffes. But we believe that the American public wants us to create facilities for these animals only if we can provide them with a good life." It was that calculus that last year led Kagan to eliminate an elephant exhibit on humane grounds.
One key consideration was Detroit's harsh winters. Although elephants can tolerate cold weather, standing on snow and ice increases the risk of slipping and falling. The only alternative was to have the animals spend most of the winter months indoors, where hard concrete led to foot problems and boredom. Many zoos, like the one in San Diego, have phased out certain species, like the moose, that do better in other climates. "Bringing cold-weather animals into the warm Southern California climate is a bad business decision and a waste of precious resources," says Larry Killmar, the zoo's deputy director of collections.
That's part of a national trend. Zoo directors routinely phase out species that don't thrive in the local environment. The ultimate example: the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, outside Tucson, which houses 300 animal species and 1,200 kinds of plants on 21 acres of desert. Unlike conventional zoos, the museum doesn't even try to take on species that are not native to the area because its mission is not to give visitors a snapshot of wildlife everywhere but to give the full story of a single ecology. "It has a completely different mind-set than most zoos," says Hancocks.
The largest zoos can't really afford to adopt that approach. The San Diego Zoo, for example, draws some 3 million visitors a year and like many big city zoos is a major contributor to the local economy. Zoo officials consider it part of their mission to inspire visitors to care about wildlife and the habitats that nurture it. "We're trying to engage people emotionally," says Andy Baker, senior vice president for animal programs at the Philadelphia Zoo, the nation's oldest. "It's much less about natural history and life cycle these days and more about empathy."
That being the case, Philadelphia, like most major zoos, is not about to transform itself into a place that shows only native fauna--black bears, raccoons, wild turkeys and chipmunks, say. Indeed, the institution has just opened up Big Cat Falls, a flashy exhibition showcasing lions, pumas, jaguars, leopards and tigers. Although the exhibit has drawn fire from animal activists, many experts believe that those animals can do fine in captivity, since even in the wild they spend much of their time sitting around digesting their last meal. Hancocks, for one, thinks gorillas and other primates can reasonably be kept in zoos. "If you can give them an intellectual environment," he says, "so they are using their minds and manipulating their fingers, they can be satisfied."
Bears, however, are a different story. Many experts believe they don't belong in zoos at all. They're too curious and exploratory to be satisfied by an artificial environment. But it's not clear what you do with a bear that's already in captivity. Animal-rights activists have long complained about the highly ritualized, seemingly neurotic behavior of Gus, the polar bear in New York City's Central Park Zoo. "Though Gus is perfectly healthy, people tell us to send him back," says Alison Powers, communications director of the Wildlife Conservation Society, Central Park's parent institution. "But Gus wasn't ripped out of the Arctic. He came from Ohio. He wouldn't stand a chance in the wild."
Many animal-behavior experts also oppose zoo confinement for giraffes, gazelles and other animals designed by evolution to run freely across miles of savannah. "What you see in zoos is just completely unnatural," says Marc Bekoff, an animal behaviorist at the University of Colorado. But most of all, Bekoff and his colleagues oppose the constraints imposed on elephants. "The only place I have seen truly happy elephants in captivity," says Hancocks, "is in the two elephant sanctuaries in the U.S. [in Tennessee and California]. Once you've seen how wonderful their lives are there, you realize whatever zoos do is doomed to be inadequate."
Hancocks' solution? A few national zoos in appropriate climates that tourists from all over the country can visit. "There are two Disney parks," he says. "That's enough for America's children. Similarly, two really good spots for elephants in the country would be sufficient."
A model for what such a spot might look like--and one that animal-behavior experts routinely cite with approval--is the zoo in Oakland, Calif., where four elephants live on 6 acres. "Our philosophy is to just let the elephants be elephants as much as possible," says executive director Joel Parrott. "That means giving them space, not dominating them, and working with them in ways that do not use physical discipline." The animals spend their days socializing, taking dust baths, swimming, eating and wallowing in the mud.
Like Parrott, Baker does not buy the idea that elephants can't be housed humanely--only that his facility doesn't have the money to do so. "I think there's still a huge amount we don't know about what animals need and want," he says. "Could we reach the point someday where we as a community say, We don't think this is a good species to keep in a zoo environment?" That option is always open. But given the pleasure zoos provide--especially for those kids pressed up against the chain-link fence--it's not one to be taken lightly.
—With reporting by Reported by Jeanne McDowell/ Los Angeles, David Bjerklie/ New York
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
In China, Protest Shuts Down Restaurant Serving Cat Meat: Sign of Things to Come or Just One Small Group of Concerned People?
Interesting that there’s even a small movement to stop this despicable practice. We’ll see if it keeps up. And look at the name of the restaurant - Fangji Cat Meatball restaurant. Can’t get anymore clear on what they serve there.
For more on the inherent cruelty of China, and to see how they actually keep and kill cats and dogs see:
http://geari.blogspot.com/2006/03/
crash-course-in-unbelievable-cruelty.html
Article:
Animal Rights Protest Shuts Down Restaurant Serving Cat Meat
http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7003959054
June 19, 2006 1:55 p.m. EST
Julie Farby - All Headline News Staff Writer
Beijing, China (AHN) - Animal rights protesters swarmed into a restaurant serving cat meat in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen and forced it to shut down.
Xinhua reports that 40 or so, mainly female demonstrators-holding banners reading "cats and dogs are friends of human beings"-entered the Fangji Cat Meatball restaurant and demanded the owner free any live cats on the premises.
According to the report, there were no live cats in the building, as the owner had already moved them out, but some burst into tears upon finding a skinned cat in a fridge.
The organizer of the protest, identified only as Isobel, the founder of a cat protection Web site, says the restaurant had been chosen because it killed cats in the street and it was "very bad for the students from nearby schools."
Many Chinese, particularly in the south, believe eating dogs and cats are good warming foods to eat during the winter. But China is developing a nascent animal rights movement as more people raise pets, which during the country's Communist heyday was frowned upon as a bourgeois activity.
For more on the inherent cruelty of China, and to see how they actually keep and kill cats and dogs see:
http://geari.blogspot.com/2006/03/
crash-course-in-unbelievable-cruelty.html
Article:
Animal Rights Protest Shuts Down Restaurant Serving Cat Meat
http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7003959054
June 19, 2006 1:55 p.m. EST
Julie Farby - All Headline News Staff Writer
Beijing, China (AHN) - Animal rights protesters swarmed into a restaurant serving cat meat in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen and forced it to shut down.
Xinhua reports that 40 or so, mainly female demonstrators-holding banners reading "cats and dogs are friends of human beings"-entered the Fangji Cat Meatball restaurant and demanded the owner free any live cats on the premises.
According to the report, there were no live cats in the building, as the owner had already moved them out, but some burst into tears upon finding a skinned cat in a fridge.
The organizer of the protest, identified only as Isobel, the founder of a cat protection Web site, says the restaurant had been chosen because it killed cats in the street and it was "very bad for the students from nearby schools."
Many Chinese, particularly in the south, believe eating dogs and cats are good warming foods to eat during the winter. But China is developing a nascent animal rights movement as more people raise pets, which during the country's Communist heyday was frowned upon as a bourgeois activity.
Whole Foods Bans Sale of Live Lobsters
A great step to raise awareness to the overall cruelty of eating lobsters, but I wonder why they actually did it. As you’ll see by the following quote, they will revisit the issue in the future:
“Whole Foods leaders will reconsider the decision if they see evidence that it's possible to ensure lobsters and crabs are treated humanely throughout the supply chain, she said.”
We’ll see what happens, but for now, this article provides a good introduction to the issue of eating lobster.
For more on why eating lobster is cruel see: http://www.animalaid.org.uk/campaign/vegan/lobster03.htm
Article:
Whole Foods bans sale of live lobsters
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060615/ap_on_bi_ge
/live_lobsters_1
By LIZ AUSTIN, Associated Press Writer
AUSTIN, Texas - Customers craving fresh crustaceans will have to look beyond Whole Foods Market Inc. after the natural-foods grocery chain decided Thursday to stop selling live lobsters and crabs on the grounds that it's inhumane.
The Austin-based grocer spent seven months studying the sale of live lobsters from ship to supermarket aisle, trying to determine whether the creatures suffer along the way.
In some stores, they experimented with "lobster condos," filling tanks with stacks of large pipes the critters can crawl inside. And they moved the tanks behind seafood counters and away from children's tapping fingers.
Ultimately, Whole Foods management decided to immediately stop selling live lobsters and soft-shell crabs, saying they could not ensure the creatures are treated with respect and compassion.
"We place as much emphasis on the importance of humane treatment and quality of life for all animals as we do on the expectations for quality and flavor," John Mackey, Whole Foods' co-founder and chief executive, said in a statement.
Animal rights activities were thrilled with the decision, not just because of the way lobsters are harvested, shipped and stored but because of the fate that awaits many of them — being dropped alive into a pot of boiling water.
"The ways that lobsters are treated would warrant felony cruelty to animals charges if they were dogs or cats," said Bruce Friedrich, a spokesman for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
In making its decision, Whole Foods pointed to a November report from the European Food Safety Authority Animal Health and Welfare panel that it said concluded all decapod crustaceans, including lobsters and crabs, appear to have some degree of awareness, feel pain and can learn.
But other scientists and seafood industry officials said Thursday that lobsters have such primitive insect-like nervous systems they don't even have brains and can't experience pain the way animals and humans do.
For example, lobsters can shed a claw that's stuck between two rocks and move on like nothing happened, said Diane Cowan, a marine biologist who studies lobster behavior in Maine.
"They certainly have a nervous system and respond to external stimuli, but whether you can call it pain I don't know," Cowan said.
About 183 million pounds of lobster are caught each year in the United States and Canada, and about 25 percent of that is sold live, according to the Lobster Institute at the University of Maine.
"People who want lobster will have lobster," said Bill Adler, executive director of the Massachusetts Lobstermen's Association. "If this particular chain does not want to serve it, people will go elsewhere."
From now on, Whole Foods will only sell frozen raw and cooked lobster products at its more than 180 stores in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, said Margaret Wittenberg, vice president of quality standards. And the chain will only deal with suppliers meeting their standards for humane treatment, handling and processing.
Whole Foods leaders will reconsider the decision if they see evidence that it's possible to ensure lobsters and crabs are treated humanely throughout the supply chain, she said.
“Whole Foods leaders will reconsider the decision if they see evidence that it's possible to ensure lobsters and crabs are treated humanely throughout the supply chain, she said.”
We’ll see what happens, but for now, this article provides a good introduction to the issue of eating lobster.
For more on why eating lobster is cruel see: http://www.animalaid.org.uk/campaign/vegan/lobster03.htm
Article:
Whole Foods bans sale of live lobsters
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060615/ap_on_bi_ge
/live_lobsters_1
By LIZ AUSTIN, Associated Press Writer
AUSTIN, Texas - Customers craving fresh crustaceans will have to look beyond Whole Foods Market Inc. after the natural-foods grocery chain decided Thursday to stop selling live lobsters and crabs on the grounds that it's inhumane.
The Austin-based grocer spent seven months studying the sale of live lobsters from ship to supermarket aisle, trying to determine whether the creatures suffer along the way.
In some stores, they experimented with "lobster condos," filling tanks with stacks of large pipes the critters can crawl inside. And they moved the tanks behind seafood counters and away from children's tapping fingers.
Ultimately, Whole Foods management decided to immediately stop selling live lobsters and soft-shell crabs, saying they could not ensure the creatures are treated with respect and compassion.
"We place as much emphasis on the importance of humane treatment and quality of life for all animals as we do on the expectations for quality and flavor," John Mackey, Whole Foods' co-founder and chief executive, said in a statement.
Animal rights activities were thrilled with the decision, not just because of the way lobsters are harvested, shipped and stored but because of the fate that awaits many of them — being dropped alive into a pot of boiling water.
"The ways that lobsters are treated would warrant felony cruelty to animals charges if they were dogs or cats," said Bruce Friedrich, a spokesman for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
In making its decision, Whole Foods pointed to a November report from the European Food Safety Authority Animal Health and Welfare panel that it said concluded all decapod crustaceans, including lobsters and crabs, appear to have some degree of awareness, feel pain and can learn.
But other scientists and seafood industry officials said Thursday that lobsters have such primitive insect-like nervous systems they don't even have brains and can't experience pain the way animals and humans do.
For example, lobsters can shed a claw that's stuck between two rocks and move on like nothing happened, said Diane Cowan, a marine biologist who studies lobster behavior in Maine.
"They certainly have a nervous system and respond to external stimuli, but whether you can call it pain I don't know," Cowan said.
About 183 million pounds of lobster are caught each year in the United States and Canada, and about 25 percent of that is sold live, according to the Lobster Institute at the University of Maine.
"People who want lobster will have lobster," said Bill Adler, executive director of the Massachusetts Lobstermen's Association. "If this particular chain does not want to serve it, people will go elsewhere."
From now on, Whole Foods will only sell frozen raw and cooked lobster products at its more than 180 stores in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, said Margaret Wittenberg, vice president of quality standards. And the chain will only deal with suppliers meeting their standards for humane treatment, handling and processing.
Whole Foods leaders will reconsider the decision if they see evidence that it's possible to ensure lobsters and crabs are treated humanely throughout the supply chain, she said.
In South Africa, Foreign Jet Set Hunters Kill More than a Million Wild Animals a Year
This isn’t some guys just out in the field. These are the jet-set, pretty, clean clothes, rich guys that get together to slap backs and do business. And, in the process, they kill many animals.
Article:
Hunters 'bag a million wild animals a year'
http://www.int.iol.co.za/index.php
June 18 2006 at 05:09PM
By Mike Cadman
As South Africa moves to regulate hunting, staggering new statistics show "biltong hunters" are killing more than a million wild animals a year.
These local hunters are quite apart from foreign "trophy" hunters who come to South Africa to shoot about 40 000 animals a year, including lion, white rhino, leopard and elephant.
These figures and new research, which shows the hunting industry is even bigger than previously thought and is worth almost R4-billion a year to South Africa, comes as the government this week considers steps towards the regulation and cleaning up of the industry.
'Hunting regulations in South Africa vary considerably from province to province'
The new statistics come from a study undertaken by North West University's Institute for Tourism Management and Leisure Studies in Potchefstroom, which estimates the 200 000 "biltong hunters" spend at least R3-billion rand a year while hunting.
The government calculates that foreign hunters contribute a further R800-million a year to the industry.
The latest figures from Professional Hunters Association of South Africa (Phasa) show that 7 342 foreign hunters, about 53 percent of whom are from the United States, shot at least 39 130 animals between October 1 2004 and September 10 2005. This includes at least 305 lions, 51 elephants, 74 white rhinos, 202 buffaloes and 34 leopards.
According to Phasa the average cost of a trophy white rhino is about $29 000 (R200 000), an elephant $21 000, a lion $17 390, a leopard $8 000 and a buffalo $7 880.
The South African government is strongly supportive of hunting and argues that the "sustainable utilisation" of wild animals is both a morally and financially acceptable practice that contributes towards the economy and helps create jobs, particularly in rural areas.
Michele Pickover of Xwe African Wildlife, an animal rights non-governmental organisation, said that while large amounts of money are spent on hunting, the industry is neither ethical nor sustainable.
"The hunting industry in South Africa is merely farming with wild animals. It is undergoing unsustainable growth and revenues are not reinvested in the preservation of wilderness and the protection of wild animals. What South Africa needs is a holistic, non-consumptive and ethically driven ecotourism industry.
"A 2004 study estimated that ecotourism on private game reserves generated more than 15 times the income derived from livestock and game rearing or foreign hunters and created more jobs," Pickover said.
Hunting regulations in South Africa vary considerably from province to province and are poorly enforced.
"Canned hunting" - animals reared to be shot are hunted in confined areas - and other malpractices within the industry have been widely condemned by hunting organisations and opponents of hunting.
Dr Peet van der Merwe, a senior lecturer at North West University, said: "The research is the most comprehensive done and shows South African hunters contribute a huge amount to local economies.
"The money is generated in the country and spent in the country so contributes directly to the economy."
Van der Merwe said that there that there were about 6 330 exempted game farms - hunting is allowed all year round on exempted game farms - in South Africa covering about 14,7 million hectares. All of South Africa's national parks cover a combined area of 3,7 million hectares.
Van der Merwe said that game farms comprise about 17,9 percent of all agricultural land in South Africa. About 50 percent of game farms are in Limpopo province and the study showed that the most commonly hunted animals are springbok, impala, blesbuck, kudu, warthog, blue wildebeest and gemsbuck.
South Africa is one of the top hunting destinations in Africa and is heavily promoted at international hunting shows and conferences. Most hunting takes place on private game farms but is also permitted in a number of provincial and private game and nature reserves.
Hunting is allowed in, among others, the Pilanesberg National Park, Madikwe Game Reserve, and the Borakalalo and Botsolano Game Reserves run by North West province, the Songimvelo Game Reserve and Mthetomusha Game Reserve run by Mpumalanga province and the Manyaleti Game Reserve and Letaba Ranch run by Limpopo province.
Both Manyaleti and Letaba share unfenced boundaries with the Kruger National Park (KNP) - raising fears that animals from the Kruger are being hunted.
Hunting also takes place on a number or private game reserves including the Associated Private Nature Reserves (APNR), which comprises the Timbavati, Umbabat, Klaserie and Balule private nature reserves. These reserves also share an unfenced boundary with the KNP.
An elephant shot and wounded by a hunter in the Umbabat Private Nature Reserve in March is believed to have fled into the KNP. During the same month landowners, lodge owners and staff in the APNR were also outraged at the hunting and wounding of a well-known lion.
The draft norms and standards, published earlier this year by the department of environmental affairs and tourism, recommend that in future the minister himself must approve all hunting that takes place in areas adjoining national parks where fences have been removed.
The document also recommends that provincial MECs must personally approve hunting in provincial reserves.
Article:
Hunters 'bag a million wild animals a year'
http://www.int.iol.co.za/index.php
June 18 2006 at 05:09PM
By Mike Cadman
As South Africa moves to regulate hunting, staggering new statistics show "biltong hunters" are killing more than a million wild animals a year.
These local hunters are quite apart from foreign "trophy" hunters who come to South Africa to shoot about 40 000 animals a year, including lion, white rhino, leopard and elephant.
These figures and new research, which shows the hunting industry is even bigger than previously thought and is worth almost R4-billion a year to South Africa, comes as the government this week considers steps towards the regulation and cleaning up of the industry.
'Hunting regulations in South Africa vary considerably from province to province'
The new statistics come from a study undertaken by North West University's Institute for Tourism Management and Leisure Studies in Potchefstroom, which estimates the 200 000 "biltong hunters" spend at least R3-billion rand a year while hunting.
The government calculates that foreign hunters contribute a further R800-million a year to the industry.
The latest figures from Professional Hunters Association of South Africa (Phasa) show that 7 342 foreign hunters, about 53 percent of whom are from the United States, shot at least 39 130 animals between October 1 2004 and September 10 2005. This includes at least 305 lions, 51 elephants, 74 white rhinos, 202 buffaloes and 34 leopards.
According to Phasa the average cost of a trophy white rhino is about $29 000 (R200 000), an elephant $21 000, a lion $17 390, a leopard $8 000 and a buffalo $7 880.
The South African government is strongly supportive of hunting and argues that the "sustainable utilisation" of wild animals is both a morally and financially acceptable practice that contributes towards the economy and helps create jobs, particularly in rural areas.
Michele Pickover of Xwe African Wildlife, an animal rights non-governmental organisation, said that while large amounts of money are spent on hunting, the industry is neither ethical nor sustainable.
"The hunting industry in South Africa is merely farming with wild animals. It is undergoing unsustainable growth and revenues are not reinvested in the preservation of wilderness and the protection of wild animals. What South Africa needs is a holistic, non-consumptive and ethically driven ecotourism industry.
"A 2004 study estimated that ecotourism on private game reserves generated more than 15 times the income derived from livestock and game rearing or foreign hunters and created more jobs," Pickover said.
Hunting regulations in South Africa vary considerably from province to province and are poorly enforced.
"Canned hunting" - animals reared to be shot are hunted in confined areas - and other malpractices within the industry have been widely condemned by hunting organisations and opponents of hunting.
Dr Peet van der Merwe, a senior lecturer at North West University, said: "The research is the most comprehensive done and shows South African hunters contribute a huge amount to local economies.
"The money is generated in the country and spent in the country so contributes directly to the economy."
Van der Merwe said that there that there were about 6 330 exempted game farms - hunting is allowed all year round on exempted game farms - in South Africa covering about 14,7 million hectares. All of South Africa's national parks cover a combined area of 3,7 million hectares.
Van der Merwe said that game farms comprise about 17,9 percent of all agricultural land in South Africa. About 50 percent of game farms are in Limpopo province and the study showed that the most commonly hunted animals are springbok, impala, blesbuck, kudu, warthog, blue wildebeest and gemsbuck.
South Africa is one of the top hunting destinations in Africa and is heavily promoted at international hunting shows and conferences. Most hunting takes place on private game farms but is also permitted in a number of provincial and private game and nature reserves.
Hunting is allowed in, among others, the Pilanesberg National Park, Madikwe Game Reserve, and the Borakalalo and Botsolano Game Reserves run by North West province, the Songimvelo Game Reserve and Mthetomusha Game Reserve run by Mpumalanga province and the Manyaleti Game Reserve and Letaba Ranch run by Limpopo province.
Both Manyaleti and Letaba share unfenced boundaries with the Kruger National Park (KNP) - raising fears that animals from the Kruger are being hunted.
Hunting also takes place on a number or private game reserves including the Associated Private Nature Reserves (APNR), which comprises the Timbavati, Umbabat, Klaserie and Balule private nature reserves. These reserves also share an unfenced boundary with the KNP.
An elephant shot and wounded by a hunter in the Umbabat Private Nature Reserve in March is believed to have fled into the KNP. During the same month landowners, lodge owners and staff in the APNR were also outraged at the hunting and wounding of a well-known lion.
The draft norms and standards, published earlier this year by the department of environmental affairs and tourism, recommend that in future the minister himself must approve all hunting that takes place in areas adjoining national parks where fences have been removed.
The document also recommends that provincial MECs must personally approve hunting in provincial reserves.
Monday, June 19, 2006
Disasters Boost Charitable Giving in US, Including to Animal Rights Causes
Great news amongst all the horrible tragedy, including the fact that “[e]nvironmental and animal rights charities grew by 16.4 per cent.”
Let’s hope this year it grows but minus the tragedy.
Article:
Disasters boost charitable giving in US
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/94cbfe04-ff2f-
11da-84f3-0000779e2340.html
By Paul Sullivan in New York
Published: June 19 2006 05:48 | Last updated: June 19 2006 05:48
The Asian tsunami and the hurricanes in the US gulf coast pushed charitable giving in the US to a near-record $260.3bn last year – a $15.4bn increase on 2004.
The last time Americans gave so much to charity was in 2000, at the height of the technology boom, when the annual Giving USA survey of philanthropy put their contributions at a record $260.5bn (€210bn, £140bn).
This year’s survey, to be released on Monday, puts charitable giving as a percentage of GDP at 2.1 per cent, above the 40-year average of 1.9 per cent.
Disaster relief accounted for half of the surge in giving, although 59 per cent of charities had an increase in donations even before relief was factored in.
As always, individuals were the biggest source of donations; their contributions last year rose by 6.4 per cent to $199.1bn, accounting for 76.5 per cent of the total.
Corporate giving rose 22.5 per cent to $13.8bn, while foundations increased their giving by 5.6 per cent to $30bn.
Seventy-nine per cent of disaster relief – $5.8bn – was contributed by individuals. This largess was encouraged by the Katrina Emergency Tax Relief Act, which doubled the tax deduction for cash donations to all public charities, including organisations that had nothing to do with the hurricane relief efforts, from 50 per cent of a person’s income to 100 per cent.
The act was intended to ensure that other charities did not suffer when wealthy Americans channelled their giving to relief organisations, as was the case after the September 11 2001 terror attacks. Some $2.8bn was given in response to the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, according to a 2004 report.
“Disaster relief certainly played a role in 2005,” says Richard Jolly, chairman of the Giving USA Foundation. “Relief contributions are estimated to be roughly 3 per cent of the total.”
The disasters also spurred donations in kind that are more difficult to calculate, says George Ruotolo, acting chair of the Giving Institute, a consultancy. He points to religious groups sending goods and volunteers to the disaster areas, but says it is difficult to calculate how much they gave because of lack of data.
The study reported two other areas of dramatic growth. Human services agencies saw a 15 per cent increase in donations excluding disaster relief; when that money was factored in, the increase jumped to 32 per cent. This comes after a three-year decline.
Environmental and animal rights charities grew by 16.4 per cent.
Religious organisations received the largest share of dollars, an estimated $93.2bn in 2005. Organisations that focused on the arts and on health experienced a drop in funding, however.
Arts giving had historically been subject to wild swings linked to big gifts and bequests, the study said, and last year that swing was down 3.4 per cent.
Health charities have shown inflation-adjusted declines or only moderate growth since 2000; their 2.7 per cent gain last year became a 0.7 per cent loss when inflation was taken into account.
From 1965 to 2005 inflation-adjusted giving increased 185 per cent, from $91.2bn to $260.3bn. Most of that growth has happened since 1996, when giving was $173.1bn.
Let’s hope this year it grows but minus the tragedy.
Article:
Disasters boost charitable giving in US
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/94cbfe04-ff2f-
11da-84f3-0000779e2340.html
By Paul Sullivan in New York
Published: June 19 2006 05:48 | Last updated: June 19 2006 05:48
The Asian tsunami and the hurricanes in the US gulf coast pushed charitable giving in the US to a near-record $260.3bn last year – a $15.4bn increase on 2004.
The last time Americans gave so much to charity was in 2000, at the height of the technology boom, when the annual Giving USA survey of philanthropy put their contributions at a record $260.5bn (€210bn, £140bn).
This year’s survey, to be released on Monday, puts charitable giving as a percentage of GDP at 2.1 per cent, above the 40-year average of 1.9 per cent.
Disaster relief accounted for half of the surge in giving, although 59 per cent of charities had an increase in donations even before relief was factored in.
As always, individuals were the biggest source of donations; their contributions last year rose by 6.4 per cent to $199.1bn, accounting for 76.5 per cent of the total.
Corporate giving rose 22.5 per cent to $13.8bn, while foundations increased their giving by 5.6 per cent to $30bn.
Seventy-nine per cent of disaster relief – $5.8bn – was contributed by individuals. This largess was encouraged by the Katrina Emergency Tax Relief Act, which doubled the tax deduction for cash donations to all public charities, including organisations that had nothing to do with the hurricane relief efforts, from 50 per cent of a person’s income to 100 per cent.
The act was intended to ensure that other charities did not suffer when wealthy Americans channelled their giving to relief organisations, as was the case after the September 11 2001 terror attacks. Some $2.8bn was given in response to the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, according to a 2004 report.
“Disaster relief certainly played a role in 2005,” says Richard Jolly, chairman of the Giving USA Foundation. “Relief contributions are estimated to be roughly 3 per cent of the total.”
The disasters also spurred donations in kind that are more difficult to calculate, says George Ruotolo, acting chair of the Giving Institute, a consultancy. He points to religious groups sending goods and volunteers to the disaster areas, but says it is difficult to calculate how much they gave because of lack of data.
The study reported two other areas of dramatic growth. Human services agencies saw a 15 per cent increase in donations excluding disaster relief; when that money was factored in, the increase jumped to 32 per cent. This comes after a three-year decline.
Environmental and animal rights charities grew by 16.4 per cent.
Religious organisations received the largest share of dollars, an estimated $93.2bn in 2005. Organisations that focused on the arts and on health experienced a drop in funding, however.
Arts giving had historically been subject to wild swings linked to big gifts and bequests, the study said, and last year that swing was down 3.4 per cent.
Health charities have shown inflation-adjusted declines or only moderate growth since 2000; their 2.7 per cent gain last year became a 0.7 per cent loss when inflation was taken into account.
From 1965 to 2005 inflation-adjusted giving increased 185 per cent, from $91.2bn to $260.3bn. Most of that growth has happened since 1996, when giving was $173.1bn.
Commercial Whaling May Once Again Continue: Vote at IWC Weakens Commercial Whaling Ban
We’ll see what happens today. Yet, not good news.
Very sad. Even more, like typical spoiled, rich babies, the “winners” then actually rub it in to the anti-whaling side and then disallow them to speak. Gee, wonder where we’ve seen this before. These quotes sum it up:
“The Japanese applauded -- which was met by head-shaking from whaling opponents. The winners shouted "sore losers'' at opponents when they tried to continue debating the resolution after the vote. The Irish delegate looked despaired, holding his head in his hands.
Representatives of anti-whaling countries were booed and shouted down after they yelled into the microphone that they did not recognize Iceland as an IWC member because it had previously dropped out. Delegates from both sides traded barbs, talking over each other to try to get their reactions heard for the record.”
Article:
Vote at IWC weakens commercial whaling ban
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/
CTVNews/20060618/
japan_whaling_060618/20060618?hub=SciTech
Updated Sun. Jun. 18 2006 11:29 PM ET
Associated Press
A slim majority of countries on the International Whaling Commission voted Sunday in support of a resumption of commercial whaling, but pro-whaling countries still lack the numbers needed to overturn a 20-year-old ban.
The resolution, approved 33-32 with one abstention, declares that the moratorium on commercial whaling was meant to be temporary and is no longer needed.
But to reverse the ban imposed in 1986, another vote supported by 75 per cent of the 70 IWC members would be required.
The IWC meeting on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts erupted in shouting and finger-pointing after the vote on the resolution authored by six Caribbean countries and backed by the major pro-whaling countries Norway, Iceland, Japan and Russia.
The Japanese applauded -- which was met by head-shaking from whaling opponents. The winners shouted "sore losers'' at opponents when they tried to continue debating the resolution after the vote. The Irish delegate looked despaired, holding his head in his hands.
Representatives of anti-whaling countries were booed and shouted down after they yelled into the microphone that they did not recognize Iceland as an IWC member because it had previously dropped out. Delegates from both sides traded barbs, talking over each other to try to get their reactions heard for the record.
Still it was not immediately clear what impact the vote would have.
"This shows the power balance is shifting, but it really shows that both sides need to sit down, compromise and stop yelling from the trenches,'' said Rune Frovik, of pro-whaling group High North Alliance.
Glenn Inwood, a spokesman for the Japanese delegation, said the vote was a "historic moment.''
"It's the first serious setback for those against whaling in years. It's only a matter of time before the commercial ban is overturned,'' he predicted.
Delegates from small Caribbean and African countries said the resolution -- the first of its kind since the ban -- was needed to force the IWC to take up its original mandate of managing whale hunts and not banning them altogether. The backers have been pushing to lift the ban, saying it was a way to protect fish stocks from whales and give their small islands food security.
"We're dealing with an ecosystem where whales are on top of the food chain,'' said Daven Joseph, an IWC delegate from St. Kitts and Nevis.
"That's like blaming woodpeckers for deforestation,'' countered Vassili Papastavrou, a whale biologist for the International Fund for Animal Welfare. "The real issue is overfishing, not whales.''
The resolution was drafted by St. Kitts, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Grenada, Dominica and Antigua.
Chris Carter, New Zealand's Conservation Minister, said though the vote was significant, it marked a hollow victory.
"It will ultimately lead to the defeat of Japan's pro-whaling ambitions,'' he said, noting it would show the world what is going on within the IWC.
"Japan had a long, expensive campaign to achieve a whaling majority, which they got today,'' he added, referring to allegations that Japan has bought votes by giving fishing aid to developing countries.
Japan and other pro-whaling countries had lost four previous and more significant pro-whaling votes at the meeting, thwarting their predicted takeover of the organization.
But with each vote, conservationists have become more worried that pro-whaling countries will eventually control the commission.
"This is going to wake people up and cause a big backlash, but it's also pretty bad, too,'' said Javier Figueroa, of the Argentinian delegation, which opposes commercial whaling.
Both Japan and Iceland kill whales for scientific research -- which critics call a sham -- and sell the carcasses. Norway ignores the moratorium and openly conducts commercial whaling.
Environmental groups have accused developing countries of voting with Japan in return for money for fisheries projects -- which Japan and those countries have repeatedly denied.
Caribbean tourism officials have said they are concerned that their countries' support of whaling might lead travellers to boycott the region.
"Such threats are tantamount to economic terrorism,'' said Joanne Massiah, Food Production and Marine Resources Minister for the Caribbean country of Antigua and Barbuda.
The IWC conference was set to continue on Monday.
Very sad. Even more, like typical spoiled, rich babies, the “winners” then actually rub it in to the anti-whaling side and then disallow them to speak. Gee, wonder where we’ve seen this before. These quotes sum it up:
“The Japanese applauded -- which was met by head-shaking from whaling opponents. The winners shouted "sore losers'' at opponents when they tried to continue debating the resolution after the vote. The Irish delegate looked despaired, holding his head in his hands.
Representatives of anti-whaling countries were booed and shouted down after they yelled into the microphone that they did not recognize Iceland as an IWC member because it had previously dropped out. Delegates from both sides traded barbs, talking over each other to try to get their reactions heard for the record.”
Article:
Vote at IWC weakens commercial whaling ban
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/
CTVNews/20060618/
japan_whaling_060618/20060618?hub=SciTech
Updated Sun. Jun. 18 2006 11:29 PM ET
Associated Press
A slim majority of countries on the International Whaling Commission voted Sunday in support of a resumption of commercial whaling, but pro-whaling countries still lack the numbers needed to overturn a 20-year-old ban.
The resolution, approved 33-32 with one abstention, declares that the moratorium on commercial whaling was meant to be temporary and is no longer needed.
But to reverse the ban imposed in 1986, another vote supported by 75 per cent of the 70 IWC members would be required.
The IWC meeting on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts erupted in shouting and finger-pointing after the vote on the resolution authored by six Caribbean countries and backed by the major pro-whaling countries Norway, Iceland, Japan and Russia.
The Japanese applauded -- which was met by head-shaking from whaling opponents. The winners shouted "sore losers'' at opponents when they tried to continue debating the resolution after the vote. The Irish delegate looked despaired, holding his head in his hands.
Representatives of anti-whaling countries were booed and shouted down after they yelled into the microphone that they did not recognize Iceland as an IWC member because it had previously dropped out. Delegates from both sides traded barbs, talking over each other to try to get their reactions heard for the record.
Still it was not immediately clear what impact the vote would have.
"This shows the power balance is shifting, but it really shows that both sides need to sit down, compromise and stop yelling from the trenches,'' said Rune Frovik, of pro-whaling group High North Alliance.
Glenn Inwood, a spokesman for the Japanese delegation, said the vote was a "historic moment.''
"It's the first serious setback for those against whaling in years. It's only a matter of time before the commercial ban is overturned,'' he predicted.
Delegates from small Caribbean and African countries said the resolution -- the first of its kind since the ban -- was needed to force the IWC to take up its original mandate of managing whale hunts and not banning them altogether. The backers have been pushing to lift the ban, saying it was a way to protect fish stocks from whales and give their small islands food security.
"We're dealing with an ecosystem where whales are on top of the food chain,'' said Daven Joseph, an IWC delegate from St. Kitts and Nevis.
"That's like blaming woodpeckers for deforestation,'' countered Vassili Papastavrou, a whale biologist for the International Fund for Animal Welfare. "The real issue is overfishing, not whales.''
The resolution was drafted by St. Kitts, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Grenada, Dominica and Antigua.
Chris Carter, New Zealand's Conservation Minister, said though the vote was significant, it marked a hollow victory.
"It will ultimately lead to the defeat of Japan's pro-whaling ambitions,'' he said, noting it would show the world what is going on within the IWC.
"Japan had a long, expensive campaign to achieve a whaling majority, which they got today,'' he added, referring to allegations that Japan has bought votes by giving fishing aid to developing countries.
Japan and other pro-whaling countries had lost four previous and more significant pro-whaling votes at the meeting, thwarting their predicted takeover of the organization.
But with each vote, conservationists have become more worried that pro-whaling countries will eventually control the commission.
"This is going to wake people up and cause a big backlash, but it's also pretty bad, too,'' said Javier Figueroa, of the Argentinian delegation, which opposes commercial whaling.
Both Japan and Iceland kill whales for scientific research -- which critics call a sham -- and sell the carcasses. Norway ignores the moratorium and openly conducts commercial whaling.
Environmental groups have accused developing countries of voting with Japan in return for money for fisheries projects -- which Japan and those countries have repeatedly denied.
Caribbean tourism officials have said they are concerned that their countries' support of whaling might lead travellers to boycott the region.
"Such threats are tantamount to economic terrorism,'' said Joanne Massiah, Food Production and Marine Resources Minister for the Caribbean country of Antigua and Barbuda.
The IWC conference was set to continue on Monday.
Independent Journalist Asserts Constitutional Rights to Resist Federal Grand Jury Subpoena: Resists the Witch Hunt Againt Animal Rights
Great article that really shows the extent the government is going in order to compel people to talk even when they might not know anything. Here’s a quick quote from the article below:
“The U.S. government's harassment of Josh Wolf is part of a broader, renewed use of the federal grand jury to suppress dissent. Information compiled by the GJRP shows that grand juries are currently being used against environmental and animal rights activists, as well as groups that have historically struggled for self-determination, like the Black Panther Party, frequently based on information from years, and in some cases decades, ago. GJRP reports that in the past year, at least 54 individuals have been subpoenaed and/or indicted in Denver, Eugene, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Diego, Tampa, FL, and Trenton, NJ. At least fourteen people refused to testify, and some were jailed for contempt.”
Article:
Independent Journalist Asserts Constitutional Rights to Resist Federal Grand Jury Subpoena
http://www.envirolink.org/external.html?itemid=200606190644500.931192
by Kris Hermes ( krishermes [at] earthlink.net )
Saturday Jun 17th, 2006 7:12 PM
U.S. government dismissed subpoena yesterday to compel testimony and video evidence to grand jury in San Francisco.
For Immediate Release: June 16, 2006
Grand Jury Resistance Project
gjrp [at] fbiwitchhunt.org
San Francisco -- In a show of courage against an attempt by the federal government to obtain First Amendment protected information, independent journalist Josh Wolf refused to testify or provide video evidence yesterday to a federal grand jury convened in February. The grand jury is investigating events surrounding a July 2005 demonstration against the Group of Eight (G8) meeting that year in Scotland. Wolf asserted his First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendment Rights as a basis for declining to answer the grand jury.
In a closed session, San Francisco District Court Judge William Alsup threatened Wolf with confinement for civil contempt if he did not comply with the subpoena. Judge Alsup was not the judge assigned to the case, and unfamiliar with prior proceedings, but insisted on hearing the matter. Making his position clear from the start, Judge Alsup ordered the hearing closed, barring a number of supporters and a San Francisco Chronicle reporter from the courtroom. The order ignored both Ninth Circuit case law and a previous order by Magistrate Maria-Elena James requiring that the hearings in the case be open.
At one point during the closed hearing, Judge Alsup called in U.S. Marshals in what appeared to be an attempt to intimidate Wolf and his attorneys. "What we saw today was the harassment and intimidation of a journalist and an activist," said Samantha Levens of the Grand Jury Resistance Project (GJRP), who observed the Marshals in the courtroom. "Yet, the dismissal of the subpoena shows how important it is to resist misuse of government power in order to obstruct political fishing expeditions and suppression of free speech rights."
The grand jury was convened ostensibly to investigate alleged damage to a police vehicle at the time of the July protest. However, the GJRP, a coalition of lawyers and activists working to resist politically motivated attacks by government, condemned the still-active investigation. The GJRP claimed that the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are working together to misuse the federal grand jury to circumvent the California Shield Law, which protects journalists' files and notes.
The U.S. government's harassment of Josh Wolf is part of a broader, renewed use of the federal grand jury to suppress dissent. Information compiled by the GJRP shows that grand juries are currently being used against environmental and animal rights activists, as well as groups that have historically struggled for self-determination, like the Black Panther Party, frequently based on information from years, and in some cases decades, ago. GJRP reports that in the past year, at least 54 individuals have been subpoenaed and/or indicted in Denver, Eugene, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Diego, Tampa, FL, and Trenton, NJ. At least fourteen people refused to testify, and some were jailed for contempt. In an affidavit filed in connection with the indictment of three environmental activists in Auburn, CA, the FBI irrelevantly referenced "anarchists" and "anarchism" 26 times. The GJRP believes that the grand jury to which Josh Wolf was subpoenaed is part of the same, broad and unconstitutional federal investigation into anarchist and antiwar activity as well as other political movements that oppose U.S. policies.
“The U.S. government's harassment of Josh Wolf is part of a broader, renewed use of the federal grand jury to suppress dissent. Information compiled by the GJRP shows that grand juries are currently being used against environmental and animal rights activists, as well as groups that have historically struggled for self-determination, like the Black Panther Party, frequently based on information from years, and in some cases decades, ago. GJRP reports that in the past year, at least 54 individuals have been subpoenaed and/or indicted in Denver, Eugene, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Diego, Tampa, FL, and Trenton, NJ. At least fourteen people refused to testify, and some were jailed for contempt.”
Article:
Independent Journalist Asserts Constitutional Rights to Resist Federal Grand Jury Subpoena
http://www.envirolink.org/external.html?itemid=200606190644500.931192
by Kris Hermes ( krishermes [at] earthlink.net )
Saturday Jun 17th, 2006 7:12 PM
U.S. government dismissed subpoena yesterday to compel testimony and video evidence to grand jury in San Francisco.
For Immediate Release: June 16, 2006
Grand Jury Resistance Project
gjrp [at] fbiwitchhunt.org
San Francisco -- In a show of courage against an attempt by the federal government to obtain First Amendment protected information, independent journalist Josh Wolf refused to testify or provide video evidence yesterday to a federal grand jury convened in February. The grand jury is investigating events surrounding a July 2005 demonstration against the Group of Eight (G8) meeting that year in Scotland. Wolf asserted his First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendment Rights as a basis for declining to answer the grand jury.
In a closed session, San Francisco District Court Judge William Alsup threatened Wolf with confinement for civil contempt if he did not comply with the subpoena. Judge Alsup was not the judge assigned to the case, and unfamiliar with prior proceedings, but insisted on hearing the matter. Making his position clear from the start, Judge Alsup ordered the hearing closed, barring a number of supporters and a San Francisco Chronicle reporter from the courtroom. The order ignored both Ninth Circuit case law and a previous order by Magistrate Maria-Elena James requiring that the hearings in the case be open.
At one point during the closed hearing, Judge Alsup called in U.S. Marshals in what appeared to be an attempt to intimidate Wolf and his attorneys. "What we saw today was the harassment and intimidation of a journalist and an activist," said Samantha Levens of the Grand Jury Resistance Project (GJRP), who observed the Marshals in the courtroom. "Yet, the dismissal of the subpoena shows how important it is to resist misuse of government power in order to obstruct political fishing expeditions and suppression of free speech rights."
The grand jury was convened ostensibly to investigate alleged damage to a police vehicle at the time of the July protest. However, the GJRP, a coalition of lawyers and activists working to resist politically motivated attacks by government, condemned the still-active investigation. The GJRP claimed that the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are working together to misuse the federal grand jury to circumvent the California Shield Law, which protects journalists' files and notes.
The U.S. government's harassment of Josh Wolf is part of a broader, renewed use of the federal grand jury to suppress dissent. Information compiled by the GJRP shows that grand juries are currently being used against environmental and animal rights activists, as well as groups that have historically struggled for self-determination, like the Black Panther Party, frequently based on information from years, and in some cases decades, ago. GJRP reports that in the past year, at least 54 individuals have been subpoenaed and/or indicted in Denver, Eugene, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Diego, Tampa, FL, and Trenton, NJ. At least fourteen people refused to testify, and some were jailed for contempt. In an affidavit filed in connection with the indictment of three environmental activists in Auburn, CA, the FBI irrelevantly referenced "anarchists" and "anarchism" 26 times. The GJRP believes that the grand jury to which Josh Wolf was subpoenaed is part of the same, broad and unconstitutional federal investigation into anarchist and antiwar activity as well as other political movements that oppose U.S. policies.
Activists Confront Beyonce Knowles About Her Love of Fur
I actually have no idea who she is, but many probably do.
Article:
Animal Rights Campaigners Confront Beyonce Knowles
http://www.allheadlinenews.com/
June 18, 2006 10:00 a.m. EST
Joanna Wypior - All Headline News Staff Reporter
New York, NY (AHN) - Two animal rights activists were asked to leave a New York City restaurant after having confronted singer and actress Beyonce Knowles about her apparent love for fur coats.
According to BBC news, Knowles remained silent as the activists quizzed her as to why she uses fur in her fashion collection, House of Dereon.
A video of the meeting at the restaurant was made by the campaigners and obtained by the Web site TMZ.com. They had also tried to show Knowles a DVD of animals being killed before being escorted out.
A spokesperson for Knowles says she has no comment about the incident.
Article:
Animal Rights Campaigners Confront Beyonce Knowles
http://www.allheadlinenews.com/
June 18, 2006 10:00 a.m. EST
Joanna Wypior - All Headline News Staff Reporter
New York, NY (AHN) - Two animal rights activists were asked to leave a New York City restaurant after having confronted singer and actress Beyonce Knowles about her apparent love for fur coats.
According to BBC news, Knowles remained silent as the activists quizzed her as to why she uses fur in her fashion collection, House of Dereon.
A video of the meeting at the restaurant was made by the campaigners and obtained by the Web site TMZ.com. They had also tried to show Knowles a DVD of animals being killed before being escorted out.
A spokesperson for Knowles says she has no comment about the incident.
Thursday, June 15, 2006
Secure the Release of a Number of Chimpanzee Elders from NIH-Related Labs
From another group.
Hi everyone,
This won't take anyone long, don't worry!
You will probably all be aware of Project R&R:Release and Restitution for
chimpanzees in US laboratories that was recently started up by NEAVS, the New
England Anti-Vivisection society.
http://www.releasechimps.org/
A very important part of this is a petition to be sent to the NIH, lab
directors etc to secure the release of a number of chimpanzee elders in their
late 40s/early 50s (a draft of this is copied below: I hope the format holds
out!). This can be signed online at:
http://ga1.org/campaign/wenka
On behalf of Project R&R, I'd like to ask you all to sign it (if you haven't already), and to distribute it to your colleagues and friends, and also any
other e-mail lists/newsgroups that you may be part of. It goes without
saying that the more signatures we get, the better!
Thanks very much for this,
Jarrod.
Dr Jarrod Bailey
Science Advisor
Project R&R: Release and Restitution for Chimpanzees in US Laboratories
New England Anti-Vivisection Society
333 Washington St., Ste. 850
Boston, MA 02108
Dear NIH Lab Director/University President:
The most recent information made available from [facility] indicates that it
holds chimpanzees born in the 1950s. Many of these individuals have been
used in research protocols or for breeding purposes for decades. They deserve
release into permanent sanctuary before they die. These chimpanzees have little
time left.
We urgently request that you exercise your power to secure the transfer of
these individuals immediately into permanent sanctuary where they may enjoy a
life of sun and space and a chimpanzee family with the relative freedom they
so deserve after so many years of research and/or breeding. Project R&R
partners with several highly reputable sanctuaries who have indicated their
ability to accept these individuals immediately.
The Chimpanzee Elders (and labs where held)
Gwen - age 54 (New Iberia)
Susie - age 52 (Primate Foundation of Arizona)
Wenka - age 52 (Yerkes)
Cheeta - age 49 (Yerkes)
Flo - age 49 (Alamogordo)
Lulu - age 49 (Yerkes)
Maxine - age 49 (Yerkes)
Harriet - age 49 (Primate Foundation of Arizona)
Jenda - age 48 (Yerkes)
Karen - age 48 (New Iberia)
Jake - age 48 (New Iberia)
Guy - age 47 (Alamogordo)
Boka - age 47 (Yerkes)
Billy Ray - age 47 (New Iberia)
Given the importance of chimpanzee social bonding, we also request that each
individual be sent along with at least one other chimpanzee cage mate or
friend. Chimpanzees form powerful bonds. It is essential that these
relationships be respected and appreciated as critical to the individuals' well being.
Disrupting family bonds and friendships is a hardship many have endured for
years. The elders must not have to pay for their release with the loss of one
more relative or friend.
A recent independent public opinion survey commissioned by Project R&R found
that 71% of Americans support the release of chimpanzees who have spent
longer than 10 years in a laboratory. These chimpanzee individuals have far
surpassed that mark.
Sincerely,
Project R&R and its supporters:
Signed by:
[Your name]
[Your address]
Hi everyone,
This won't take anyone long, don't worry!
You will probably all be aware of Project R&R:Release and Restitution for
chimpanzees in US laboratories that was recently started up by NEAVS, the New
England Anti-Vivisection society.
http://www.releasechimps.org/
A very important part of this is a petition to be sent to the NIH, lab
directors etc to secure the release of a number of chimpanzee elders in their
late 40s/early 50s (a draft of this is copied below: I hope the format holds
out!). This can be signed online at:
http://ga1.org/campaign/wenka
On behalf of Project R&R, I'd like to ask you all to sign it (if you haven't already), and to distribute it to your colleagues and friends, and also any
other e-mail lists/newsgroups that you may be part of. It goes without
saying that the more signatures we get, the better!
Thanks very much for this,
Jarrod.
Dr Jarrod Bailey
Science Advisor
Project R&R: Release and Restitution for Chimpanzees in US Laboratories
New England Anti-Vivisection Society
333 Washington St., Ste. 850
Boston, MA 02108
Dear NIH Lab Director/University President:
The most recent information made available from [facility] indicates that it
holds chimpanzees born in the 1950s. Many of these individuals have been
used in research protocols or for breeding purposes for decades. They deserve
release into permanent sanctuary before they die. These chimpanzees have little
time left.
We urgently request that you exercise your power to secure the transfer of
these individuals immediately into permanent sanctuary where they may enjoy a
life of sun and space and a chimpanzee family with the relative freedom they
so deserve after so many years of research and/or breeding. Project R&R
partners with several highly reputable sanctuaries who have indicated their
ability to accept these individuals immediately.
The Chimpanzee Elders (and labs where held)
Gwen - age 54 (New Iberia)
Susie - age 52 (Primate Foundation of Arizona)
Wenka - age 52 (Yerkes)
Cheeta - age 49 (Yerkes)
Flo - age 49 (Alamogordo)
Lulu - age 49 (Yerkes)
Maxine - age 49 (Yerkes)
Harriet - age 49 (Primate Foundation of Arizona)
Jenda - age 48 (Yerkes)
Karen - age 48 (New Iberia)
Jake - age 48 (New Iberia)
Guy - age 47 (Alamogordo)
Boka - age 47 (Yerkes)
Billy Ray - age 47 (New Iberia)
Given the importance of chimpanzee social bonding, we also request that each
individual be sent along with at least one other chimpanzee cage mate or
friend. Chimpanzees form powerful bonds. It is essential that these
relationships be respected and appreciated as critical to the individuals' well being.
Disrupting family bonds and friendships is a hardship many have endured for
years. The elders must not have to pay for their release with the loss of one
more relative or friend.
A recent independent public opinion survey commissioned by Project R&R found
that 71% of Americans support the release of chimpanzees who have spent
longer than 10 years in a laboratory. These chimpanzee individuals have far
surpassed that mark.
Sincerely,
Project R&R and its supporters:
Signed by:
[Your name]
[Your address]
An In-depth Look at Horse Slaughter: Why Is It Occurring, How Is It Occurring and What Will Occur In The Future?
This is another great article on horse slaughter for meat. It’s a definite read to be fully informed of this disturbing practice.
Here are a couple additional resources for more information on this issue. Please contact them to see how you can help or for more information. They are also listed at the end of the article:
Habitat for Horses
http://www.habitatforhorses.org/
Phone: (866)HFH-LSER
HSUS
http://www.hsus.org
2100 L Street NW
Washington, DC 20037
Phone: (202) 452-1100
Article:
The Killing Floor
Three Slaughterhouses Marked the End of the Road for 88,000 American Horses in 2005. But It’s Europeans Who Are Eating the Meat.
http://www.emagazine.com/view/?3173&src=
by Josh Harkinson
Horses head in for slaughter at the now-shuttered Florence Packing facility in Stanwood, Washington in the early 1990s. There were then 11 horse slaughter plants in the U.S.
©Gail Eisnitz
In the East Texas hamlet of Kaufman last month, a fetid wind ruffled the stripes of the largest American flag in town. It had been a gift to locals from executives of the pungent Dallas Crown slaughterhouse. A few blocks away, company president Michael deBeukelaar stood in City Hall for the Pledge of Allegiance, conspicuously holding his tongue. The Belgian and his foreign bosses were about to learn whether a city commission would force a shutdown of the plant, which had supplied meat to tables in Europe and Japan for more than 20 years. deBeukelaar seemed most concerned with one intractable problem: Americans don’t eat horse.
Clad in a European-cut blazer with felt arm patches, deBeukelaar squared off against a Texan in a Johnny Cash getup of faded black. Houstonian Jerry Finch had for years been a leader in local and national fights to shut down Dallas Crown, Fort Worth-based Beltex Corporation and Cavel International of DeKalb, Illinois, the country’s three horse slaughterhouses, which together killed 88,000 horses last year. Finch traded sharp whispers with a posse of activists. “Nobody wants to recognize horse slaughter for what it is,” he’d said earlier that day. “It’s just murder.”
The commission reached a decision late in the night, unanimously ruling to close the plant by September. An attorney for Dallas Crown pledged to take the battle to court. Finch stepped outside, lit a cigarette and cried. “We did it,” he said as a comrade embraced him. The activists ordered vegetarian pizzas and partied into the morning.
But many other equine enthusiasts around the country weren’t celebrating. Shuttering the slaughterhouses of Texas won’t help horses, they say, and it might just force them someplace worse.
Ill Winds
On a prominent hillock above Kaufman’s main highway, the corrugated metal facade of the Dallas Crown slaughterhouse announced itself without a sign. Its herald was borne on the wind—a simultaneously musky and astringent odor of horse fur, chlorine, feces and blood.
Finch, whose white moustache lightens a red leathery face, lumbered past the plant and down a side street in a jacked-up Dodge Ram that could be straight off any Texas back 40. He grew up in Amarillo, where he worked summers at a riding stable rounding up steeds. “It was just the best damn job in the world,” he says. College led Finch out of the pasture and into a sales job in the Houston suburbs, but not to happiness. In 1995 he retired early, bought a ranch and rekindled his passion for riding animals. He now operates Habitat for Horses, the largest equine rescue group in the South.
Finch guarded his pickup as two fellow activists, lugging cameras and tripods, bushwacked through hackberry trees, past junked cars and into a clearing along the edge of Dallas Crown’s perimeter. John Holland, a computer programmer from Virginia, raised his camcorder just over the top of a metal barricade and stared up at the small video screen. It showed a healthy- looking herd draping heads over a fence. After a few minutes, a worker yelled “Hoy! Hoy! Hoy!” and spooked them into a chute. He whipped a stubborn straggler in the rump. “That’s one smart horse,” Holland said as he zoomed the camera. “I hope he kicks the crap out of that guy.”
The activists were filming Dallas Crown in the hope that the footage would fan public outrage over horse slaughter. If it does, it won’t be the first time that the idea of eating Silver or Mr. Ed has irked the Texan temperament. A nearly forgotten state statute dating to 1949 prohibits the slaughter of horses for human consumption. In fact, the law gained new prominence in 2002 when attorney general John Cornyn ruled it legal. But last year U.S. District Judge Terry Means found federal law superseded the old slaughter ban. An appeal is pending.
According to court records, the plants last year sold a total of 1,750 tons of meat to U.S. zoos, and exported another 17,000 tons for human consumption.
A campaign to outlaw horse slaughter last year at the federal level was bolstered by polls showing 70 to 90 percent of Americans opposed killing horses for meat. Some congressional offices received more calls in favor of a proposed U.S. slaughter ban than they did regarding the recent Supreme Court nominations or Hurricane Katrina. One Senate office, fielding a call every six minutes, begged a Humane Society lobbyist to ward off the siege. “They couldn’t function,” she says.
Dissecting a slaughtered carcass, again at Florence Packing in Washington. Do the methods used by plants like this former one meet humane standards?
©Gail Eisnitz
A similar upwelling of public support pushed through a 1998 ballot measure banning horse slaughter in California. Dick Schumacher, president of the California Veterinary Medical Association at the time, attributes the move to a shift in public perceptions of horses. “They are now seen less as livestock,” he said, “and more as pets.”
Last year’s national anti-slaughter campaign helped pass a federal spending bill in November that should have already closed the plants, slaughter foes say. H.R. 2744 removed funding for U.S. Agriculture Department (USDA) inspectors who must by law supervise the slaughterhouses. Yet the USDA recently bypassed the roadblock by allowing the plants to continue operating under the watch of inspectors paid with private funds. Last March, a U.S. District Court upheld the decision. The Humane Society is weighing an appeal.
Although they say they have nothing to hide, none of the slaughterhouses have allowed activists or the press inside. E had tentatively set up such a visit, but it was vetoed by the plants’ European owners. “We’re a little concerned about the purpose of someone coming there,” says Dallas Crown attorney Mark Calabria. “If it’s simply to run us down or paint us in a bad light, we don’t really see the need to open the door.”
Finch led his video crew around the plant, past a half dozen snarling, chained rottweilers, to a tangle of pipes and vents. Misters sprayed deodorizer that did little to mask the stink of intestines. From inside a narrow cinderblock structure came an occasional chain rattle, whinny and thud. This was the plant’s “kill room.”
Many horses here suffer horribly painful deaths, Finch believes. A gun with a retractable spike, known as a “captive bolt,” is supposed to fell the animals in one quick jolt to the brain. But two different workers kill horses for the plant on different days and Finch often hears one of them shoot the bolt repeatedly. “The Thursday guy is good,” he said. “The Monday guy is terrible.”
U.S. and European regulations ensure the horses are killed humanely, said Brent Gattis, a spokesperson for the slaughterhouses. “Although I am told by the plants that they haven’t had any problems with ‘missing,’ or however you want to say that, the Europeans require them to have an extra captive bolt at the ready just in case there is a problem,” he says.
Whatever happens inside the plant, there’s little dispute that slaughtering a large animal can be nasty. Angling out of the kill room and over a puddle of blood, a conveyor belt carried a freshly stripped-off horse pelt, turning it over the lip of a dumpster in a bundle of ear, skin and tail. The scene was a stone’s throw from the backyard of a house where children played.
Robert Eldridge, a homeowner who lives downwind of the plant, joined Finch at the fence line. Eldridge and many other residents of the predominately black, Boggy Bottom neighborhood have lived next to the facility since it opened as a cattle slaughterhouse in 1954. Thirty-two years later it was retrofitted to accept horses. A log kept by neighbor Edward Caves, who has since passed away, reported horse parts along the road, green fly infestations in his home and frequently noted, “Had odors for breakfast.”
In 2004, the plant was cited for 31 separate wastewater violations. “These people don’t care about anything but making money,” Eldridge said over the hum of the conveyor belt. “Anybody else is just a piece of trash.”
But even if the plant cleaned up its act, Finch wouldn’t be satisfied. His opposition to the slaughterhouse is grounded in a visceral sense that eating a horse violates a nearly spiritual relationship between man and beast, and that horses and humans have forged a sacred trust based on mutual aid and an intuitive bond. “Horses know us better than we do sometimes,” he says. “They know our feelings, our emotions. So my issue with this whole slaughter thing is: it’s just a deep betrayal by us.”
To the Rescue
Last month, at Finch’s horse rescue headquarters south of Houston, an anonymous tip arrived: a horse in a nearby backyard looked dirty, lethargic and malnourished. A Texas judge issued an order to seize the animal and dispatched a “squad car,” which was followed by Finch and Habitat’s trailer-rigged F-350. The entourage stopped at a cheerful barn painted with a Texas flag. At the back of the lot stood the horse, a 13-hand dun with protruding hip bones and a shaggy coat caked in mud. As Finch approached holding a halter, the gelding (a castrated male horse) bolted for a gate, fell to the ground and shakily lifted himself. Finch wrapped its neck with a lead rope. “They really can’t come any skinnier than this,” said Jennifer Sylvester, who manages Finch’s ranch. “Well, I guess they can, maybe when they’re dead.”
The horse, Shorty, was so skinny that if he’d been taken to a slaughterhouse it would probably refuse him, says Finch. Unloaded at a temporary foster home, Shorty ravenously mouthed up an expensive snack of high-fiber bet pulp and alfalfa cubes, the only thing tolerable by his ingrown teeth and fragile stomach. Finch would soon be granted permanent custody of the horse under Texas animal cruelty law, but already, the price of caring for it was adding up. Rehabilitating Shorty over the next six months would cost more than $3,000. “And if we’re lucky,” says Finch, “we will get $300 out of it in adoption fees.”
Finch’s rescue network includes 168 foster homes spread across three states. It cares for 300 horses at a time, and yet Finch is the first to admit that taking all of the region’s unwanted horses is impossible. For every Shorty that Finch accepts, he has to turn away several perfectly healthy horses that are no longer wanted by their owners.
“We can take care of what we have,” he says, “but we are pretty much maxed out at the ranch.”
America’s bumper crop of equine orphans—a product of over-breeding and fickle hobbyists—is the main reason the American Quarterhorse Association, the American Veterinary Medical Association and even some horse rescue groups don’t oppose the horse slaughterhouses. “I think we have to use a little horse sense,” says Donna Ewing. She’s the 71-year-old founder of the nation’s oldest horse rescue group, the Illinois-based Hooved Animal Humane Society. “Where are they going to get the money to give these animals the quality of life they deserve?”
Even Finch admits that a ban on horse slaughter probably won’t save the lives of every unwanted horse. Instead, it’s likely to force horse owners to pay veterinarians to euthanize them and rendering companies to dispose of them. Finch believes euthanasia is more humane than slaughter, but it’s also more expensive. Vets charge between $75 and $150 to put down a horse. Disposing of the carcass, when it can’t be buried, costs $250 or more. Sending a horse to slaughter nets a horse owner roughly $500 for a mid-sized animal.
Take the slaughter option away, Ewing says, and horse abuse cases such as Shorty’s will spike. Rather than pay to dispose of unwanted horses, some owners will turn them loose in the wild or leave them to die slow, agonizing deaths at pasture.
But despite the logical appeal of the “unwanted horse theory,” as it is sometimes known, it’s thus far unsubstantiated. California, the only major state with a slaughter ban, doesn’t keep stats on horse abuse. The closest thing to a study on the theory was done by Holland, the Virginia computer programmer, who analyzed what happened after a fire idled the horse slaughterhouse in DeKalb for nearly three years.
Accounting for slaughterhouses in Texas and Canada picking up some of the plant’s business, he estimated 50,000 horses were nonetheless saved from slaughter even as horse abuse cases in Illinois declined. Anecdotal reports from California back up Holland’s assertion that the “unwanted horse theory” is a myth. Carolyn Stull, a UC Davis animal welfare expert, found no increase in horse abuse cases since the ban.
Still, the evidence is far from conclusive. Even Holland concedes horse abuse will jump wildly year-to-year based on other factors such as rainfall and temperature. And Stull wonders if California is just outsourcing its problems. The state’s slaughter ban includes few provisions for monitoring what happens to horses after they cross state lines, and no aid for horse care. A recent seizure of more than 600 emaciated mustangs from a ranch overwhelmed the state’s rescue groups, which had to export many of them to already strapped adoption agencies across the U.S.
Ewing fears a national horse slaughter ban will send meat horses on arduous treks to auctions in Canada and Mexico. Stiff horse export fees and inspection requirements—totalling at least $70 per head—will probably significantly limit the practice, but even outspoken slaughter foes say it might sometimes happen.
Ewing counsels caution. “Until we have a better solution,” she says, “I think we’d better pull back, because we are going to cause more cruelty by stopping the slaughterhouses.”
Horses for Sale
Cathleen Haggerty sat in the chipped wooden bleachers of the Great Western Trading Company horse auction in Magnolia, Texas and twisted her hands in agonized speculation over which noble steeds might soon be dinner. A diminutive and wide-eyed horse—Haggerty called it a mustang—bolted into the auction pen and nearly bowled over a teenager. Haggerty glanced at a man in the audience who she called Santa Claus, a horse buyer in a sweat-stained cowboy hat and a bushy white beard, associated in her mind with the St. Nick of coal and switches.
“No one else is going to buy him,” she fretted.
Between machine-gun babble the auctioneer spat quotes like a penny stock ticker. $75, $100, $125. He paused and offered the horse the best compliment he could muster: “Project for somebody.” Haggerty squirmed in her seat. “All in, all done, hundred quarter, hundred half, dickadickadickadeedaa,” he slammed a gavel. “Sell ‘em hundred and a quarter and put him on 3523.”
“He just—shit!—A killer just got him,” Haggerty gasped.
Santa Claus bought the horse for well below 35 cents per pound—the “meat price” offered by the slaughterhouses.
At least 30 mustangs have ended up as slabs of flesh since a new federal law last year began requiring the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to collect wild horses older than 11 years and sell them. Responding to public outrage, the BLM created a contract that is supposed to prohibit buyers from sending the horses to slaughter, at least directly. But mustangs can be difficult to train, says Jill Starr, president of Lifesavers Wild Horse Rescue. “There aren’t places for these horses to go.”
Experience adopting other high-risk horses is similarly mixed. Haggerty, a registered nurse, has spent much of her own time and money rescuing horses that are byproducts of the pharmaceuticals industry. The drug Premarin, used to treat the symptoms of menopause, is produced from the urine of impregnated mares. In 2002, when the drug was found by the National Institutes of Health to cause increased risk of heart disease, breast cancer and other ailments, many stables sold off their stocks of Premarin mares. Overwhelmed rescue groups couldn’t keep them from slaughter. Yet Haggerty thinks the market for the horses has since evolved. “Once the word got out that they can jump and they’re nice riding horses,” she says, “then people decided to bite the bullet and rescue them.”
Racehorse rescue efforts have also seen modest improvements. Spurred by outrage that Ferdinand, winner of the 1986 Kentucky Derby, was most likely slaughtered in Japan in 2002, the New York Racing Association last year created the Ferdinand Fee, an optional donation program to help keep old racehorses alive. Nonetheless, rescue groups estimate up to 6,000 racehorses in the United States are still slaughtered each year; they’re too hot tempered or decrepit to become pleasure horses. “Racing takes its toll on them,” says Diana Pikulski, executive director of the Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation. She’s trying to make the Ferdinand Fee mandatory.
Overall, expanded horse rescue efforts are one reason the number of horses slaughtered in the U.S. has fallen sharply since 1990, when more than 300,000 were killed. Another reason is the expiration of Reagan-era tax benefits that encouraged the breeding of thoroughbred horses.
Even so, slaughter menaces some horses that are well-trained and even well-loved by their owners. In 2004, Cimaron, a young Morab gelding owned by 13-year-old Sky Dutchner of upstate New York, was stolen. Months of searching by the watchdog group Stolen Horse International found he’d been shipped north along the so-called “torture trail” to Quebec and slaughtered. Debbie Metcalf, the group’s founder, estimates that 40,000 horses are stolen in the U.S. annually.
“The thieves are looking for somebody to fence them pretty fast,” Metcalf says. Slaughterhouses can be ready buyers, but they’re required by law to check horses against a list of steeds that have been reported stolen. Branding a horse and implanting it with a small tracking microchip drastically improves the chances of recovering it. “It will be awfully hard to remove a microchip,” Metcalf says. “The average thief is not going to do that.”
Many slaughter foes fear kill buyers are outbidding other potential purchasers, making horses worth more in sausages than under saddles. But Haggerty, though anti-slaughter, has attended numerous auctions in Texas and never seen a pleasure horse buyer outbid. In fact, the costs of caring for an equine—at least $3,000 a year—quickly outstrip the purchase price. “If you can’t afford to pay a thousand dollars for a good riding horse, minimum,” Ewing says, “then you cannot afford to keep that horse.”
Still, the path an unwanted horse takes to slaughter is often poorly understood by its original owners. Texas law requires notices at auctions to inform sellers that their horses could be bought for meat. No such sign was visible at the Magnolia auction; owner Don Edwards said no kill buyers work there. He said Santa Claus is a cattle trader. Yet many livestock traders re-sell horses to kill buyers if no other takers bite. The ambiguity of such wheeling and dealing suits many horse owners, who might suspect yet don’t want to know that selling their kid’s old pony is leaving blood on their hands.
Mayor Paula Bacon of Kaufman, home of Dallas Crown: “My community has just been a doormat for this,” she says. “Horse slaughter is not a service; it’s abuse.”
©Josh Harkinson
Finch encourages horse owners who can’t find homes for their animals to simply put them down. “It is very difficult to turn somebody away,” he says, “but I always try to tell people that euthanasia is the best option. Don’t send them to slaughter.”
From the horse’s point of view, however, being sold at the block may turn out better than being “humanely” killed. Even the most tattered Black Beauty dumped at auction has a small chance of finding a loving owner. The slaughterhouses in some ways help keep hope alive for these down-and-out steeds. Knowing the animals can always be sold at a profit for meat enables horse traders to buy them and first shop around elsewhere for higher bidders. Euthanasia, as an alternative, leaves no room for luck except in the afterlife.
Beyond Saving
Suzy’s owners wanted to keep the mare’s newborn foal, but they didn’t want to keep Suzy. By the time she gave birth in August, all four of her hooves had decayed down to her leg bones, a painful condition known as foundering. The owners didn’t want to send the 20-year-old palomino to slaughter, yet didn’t want to pay to put her down. They gave her to Finch. “This was, I think, somewhat of a typical situation,” he says.
Finch’s vet worked on Suzy’s feet for two weeks, but her case was hopeless. So in lieu of treatment Finch plied the ailing horse with apple slices, carrots and peppermint candies. “Why not?” he said. “Spoil ‘em rotten.” Meanwhile, a backhoe dug a ditch. And in the morning, Finch led the limping horse to the edge of her grave.
As usual, Finch encouraged most Habitat for Horses volunteers to stay away. He didn’t want their sobbing to upset the horse. Wielded by his vet, a 14-gauge needle pierced Suzy’s neck and pumped a syringe of Ace through her blood system. The sedative induced sleep. Suzy remained standing, swaying slightly, as Finch rubbed her neck and everyone cried. Then all of them stepped back. The next injection—60 cubic centimeters of sodium pentobarbital—would stop Suzy’s heart. Sometimes horses lunge dangerously as their organs shudder to a halt. Suzy simply keeled over, gasped a few times, and stopped breathing.
The 73 horses put down on Finch’s ranch all died in peaceful surroundings among people who cared for them. Unlike horses that are slaughtered, they were “very, very comfortable,” he says. “There is no terror, no fear.”
But not all veterinarians are so sure. After horses are injected with euthanasia drugs, “there is a period of time when they are going through the process of dying,” says Bill Moyer, head of the large animal department of the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine. “What we don’t know is exactly what is going through their heads at that time.”
Moyer and other vets are most concerned about environmental impacts of euthanasia. Unlike horsemeat from slaughterhouses, which can also be made into dog food, horse carcasses laced with sodium pentobarbital are poisonous. Burying them in some states is illegal. The ambivalence of the Humane Society of the U.S. (HSUS) towards the practice is relatively rare. “Most other countries think we are spoiled beyond belief,” Moyer says.
HSUS spokesperson Nancy Perry says horse owners who are concerned about the environmental impacts or cost of chemical euthanasia should, instead of sending a horse to a slaughterhouse, shoot it in the head. “A very well-placed gunshot is the only other acceptable option for them,” she says.
But a blast to the brain with a .45 is essentially the same as the “captive bolt” technology used by the slaughterhouses. Both kill a horse instantly. The American Veterinary Medical Association’s 2002 panel on euthanasia approved the captive bolt method as humane, “if done properly,” said panel chair Bonnie Beaver. And, she adds, the chances of a trained slaughterhouse worker screwing up under the watch of a government inspector and the threat of a fine are probably miniscule compared to the average bubba misfiring his Magnum in a stable.
Still, HSUS has ignored the Cheney factor in favor of calling slaughterhouse kill skills “careless and improper.” The closest thing the group produces to corroborating evidence is a widely circulated 1993 video taken inside a slaughterhouse that shows the thrashing body of a bolted horse. It is almost certainly undergoing a painless nerve reaction, Beaver says, similar to the flapping of a decapitated chicken.
In the end, the best argument against the slaughterhouses is probably their refusal to open their doors to the press. Hardly any unbiased observers have seen them operate. HSUS discounts veterinarians as beholden to livestock and rancher interests. Veterinarians say HSUS is making a big deal out of nothing to raise donations from a gullible public. Ewing of Illinois, one of very few horse rescue people to see the inside of a plant, is despised by much of the rescue community as a Benedict Arnold. “I saw absolutely nothing inhumane about the handling or the killing,” she says.
In fact, Ewing’s biggest concern about horse slaughter isn’t the slaughter itself, but how the horses get to the slaughterhouses. Wayne Pacelle, president of HSUS, points out that horses are “flight animals,” and when held in confinement for long periods of time suffer much more than similarly transported cows, pigs and chickens. USDA rules permit horses to be shipped for 28 hours straight without nourishment. Yet for healthy privately owned horses—usually towed in much more comfortable trailers—vets recommend offloading for food and water every four hours. Making that kind of requirement for meat horses would probably be so costly that it would end long distance hauling.
Finch hopes such a rule would also end horse slaughter altogether, but Ewing says she has a better idea. Instead of shutting down horse slaughterhouses, she suggests building more of them. Cut down the travel time for horses by building a state-of-the-art, humane slaughterhouse in every large state. The meat sales would pay them off. The service would save horse owners money and probably reduce abuse cases, she believes. Whether worms in the ground or Frenchmen eat the horses doesn’t concern Ewing.
“What happens to their body is OK,” she says. “It’s the soul I worry about. It’s the horse that’s alive that can feel and think. It’s how they are treated then that is important.” But when it comes to horses, the fate of both body and soul remain hotly contested.
JOSH HARKINSON, a former E intern, is a reporter for the Houston Press. This article was prepared in cooperation with that paper, which is running it simultaneously.
Here are a couple additional resources for more information on this issue. Please contact them to see how you can help or for more information. They are also listed at the end of the article:
Habitat for Horses
http://www.habitatforhorses.org/
Phone: (866)HFH-LSER
HSUS
http://www.hsus.org
2100 L Street NW
Washington, DC 20037
Phone: (202) 452-1100
Article:
The Killing Floor
Three Slaughterhouses Marked the End of the Road for 88,000 American Horses in 2005. But It’s Europeans Who Are Eating the Meat.
http://www.emagazine.com/view/?3173&src=
by Josh Harkinson
Horses head in for slaughter at the now-shuttered Florence Packing facility in Stanwood, Washington in the early 1990s. There were then 11 horse slaughter plants in the U.S.
©Gail Eisnitz
In the East Texas hamlet of Kaufman last month, a fetid wind ruffled the stripes of the largest American flag in town. It had been a gift to locals from executives of the pungent Dallas Crown slaughterhouse. A few blocks away, company president Michael deBeukelaar stood in City Hall for the Pledge of Allegiance, conspicuously holding his tongue. The Belgian and his foreign bosses were about to learn whether a city commission would force a shutdown of the plant, which had supplied meat to tables in Europe and Japan for more than 20 years. deBeukelaar seemed most concerned with one intractable problem: Americans don’t eat horse.
Clad in a European-cut blazer with felt arm patches, deBeukelaar squared off against a Texan in a Johnny Cash getup of faded black. Houstonian Jerry Finch had for years been a leader in local and national fights to shut down Dallas Crown, Fort Worth-based Beltex Corporation and Cavel International of DeKalb, Illinois, the country’s three horse slaughterhouses, which together killed 88,000 horses last year. Finch traded sharp whispers with a posse of activists. “Nobody wants to recognize horse slaughter for what it is,” he’d said earlier that day. “It’s just murder.”
The commission reached a decision late in the night, unanimously ruling to close the plant by September. An attorney for Dallas Crown pledged to take the battle to court. Finch stepped outside, lit a cigarette and cried. “We did it,” he said as a comrade embraced him. The activists ordered vegetarian pizzas and partied into the morning.
But many other equine enthusiasts around the country weren’t celebrating. Shuttering the slaughterhouses of Texas won’t help horses, they say, and it might just force them someplace worse.
Ill Winds
On a prominent hillock above Kaufman’s main highway, the corrugated metal facade of the Dallas Crown slaughterhouse announced itself without a sign. Its herald was borne on the wind—a simultaneously musky and astringent odor of horse fur, chlorine, feces and blood.
Finch, whose white moustache lightens a red leathery face, lumbered past the plant and down a side street in a jacked-up Dodge Ram that could be straight off any Texas back 40. He grew up in Amarillo, where he worked summers at a riding stable rounding up steeds. “It was just the best damn job in the world,” he says. College led Finch out of the pasture and into a sales job in the Houston suburbs, but not to happiness. In 1995 he retired early, bought a ranch and rekindled his passion for riding animals. He now operates Habitat for Horses, the largest equine rescue group in the South.
Finch guarded his pickup as two fellow activists, lugging cameras and tripods, bushwacked through hackberry trees, past junked cars and into a clearing along the edge of Dallas Crown’s perimeter. John Holland, a computer programmer from Virginia, raised his camcorder just over the top of a metal barricade and stared up at the small video screen. It showed a healthy- looking herd draping heads over a fence. After a few minutes, a worker yelled “Hoy! Hoy! Hoy!” and spooked them into a chute. He whipped a stubborn straggler in the rump. “That’s one smart horse,” Holland said as he zoomed the camera. “I hope he kicks the crap out of that guy.”
The activists were filming Dallas Crown in the hope that the footage would fan public outrage over horse slaughter. If it does, it won’t be the first time that the idea of eating Silver or Mr. Ed has irked the Texan temperament. A nearly forgotten state statute dating to 1949 prohibits the slaughter of horses for human consumption. In fact, the law gained new prominence in 2002 when attorney general John Cornyn ruled it legal. But last year U.S. District Judge Terry Means found federal law superseded the old slaughter ban. An appeal is pending.
According to court records, the plants last year sold a total of 1,750 tons of meat to U.S. zoos, and exported another 17,000 tons for human consumption.
A campaign to outlaw horse slaughter last year at the federal level was bolstered by polls showing 70 to 90 percent of Americans opposed killing horses for meat. Some congressional offices received more calls in favor of a proposed U.S. slaughter ban than they did regarding the recent Supreme Court nominations or Hurricane Katrina. One Senate office, fielding a call every six minutes, begged a Humane Society lobbyist to ward off the siege. “They couldn’t function,” she says.
Dissecting a slaughtered carcass, again at Florence Packing in Washington. Do the methods used by plants like this former one meet humane standards?
©Gail Eisnitz
A similar upwelling of public support pushed through a 1998 ballot measure banning horse slaughter in California. Dick Schumacher, president of the California Veterinary Medical Association at the time, attributes the move to a shift in public perceptions of horses. “They are now seen less as livestock,” he said, “and more as pets.”
Last year’s national anti-slaughter campaign helped pass a federal spending bill in November that should have already closed the plants, slaughter foes say. H.R. 2744 removed funding for U.S. Agriculture Department (USDA) inspectors who must by law supervise the slaughterhouses. Yet the USDA recently bypassed the roadblock by allowing the plants to continue operating under the watch of inspectors paid with private funds. Last March, a U.S. District Court upheld the decision. The Humane Society is weighing an appeal.
Although they say they have nothing to hide, none of the slaughterhouses have allowed activists or the press inside. E had tentatively set up such a visit, but it was vetoed by the plants’ European owners. “We’re a little concerned about the purpose of someone coming there,” says Dallas Crown attorney Mark Calabria. “If it’s simply to run us down or paint us in a bad light, we don’t really see the need to open the door.”
Finch led his video crew around the plant, past a half dozen snarling, chained rottweilers, to a tangle of pipes and vents. Misters sprayed deodorizer that did little to mask the stink of intestines. From inside a narrow cinderblock structure came an occasional chain rattle, whinny and thud. This was the plant’s “kill room.”
Many horses here suffer horribly painful deaths, Finch believes. A gun with a retractable spike, known as a “captive bolt,” is supposed to fell the animals in one quick jolt to the brain. But two different workers kill horses for the plant on different days and Finch often hears one of them shoot the bolt repeatedly. “The Thursday guy is good,” he said. “The Monday guy is terrible.”
U.S. and European regulations ensure the horses are killed humanely, said Brent Gattis, a spokesperson for the slaughterhouses. “Although I am told by the plants that they haven’t had any problems with ‘missing,’ or however you want to say that, the Europeans require them to have an extra captive bolt at the ready just in case there is a problem,” he says.
Whatever happens inside the plant, there’s little dispute that slaughtering a large animal can be nasty. Angling out of the kill room and over a puddle of blood, a conveyor belt carried a freshly stripped-off horse pelt, turning it over the lip of a dumpster in a bundle of ear, skin and tail. The scene was a stone’s throw from the backyard of a house where children played.
Robert Eldridge, a homeowner who lives downwind of the plant, joined Finch at the fence line. Eldridge and many other residents of the predominately black, Boggy Bottom neighborhood have lived next to the facility since it opened as a cattle slaughterhouse in 1954. Thirty-two years later it was retrofitted to accept horses. A log kept by neighbor Edward Caves, who has since passed away, reported horse parts along the road, green fly infestations in his home and frequently noted, “Had odors for breakfast.”
In 2004, the plant was cited for 31 separate wastewater violations. “These people don’t care about anything but making money,” Eldridge said over the hum of the conveyor belt. “Anybody else is just a piece of trash.”
But even if the plant cleaned up its act, Finch wouldn’t be satisfied. His opposition to the slaughterhouse is grounded in a visceral sense that eating a horse violates a nearly spiritual relationship between man and beast, and that horses and humans have forged a sacred trust based on mutual aid and an intuitive bond. “Horses know us better than we do sometimes,” he says. “They know our feelings, our emotions. So my issue with this whole slaughter thing is: it’s just a deep betrayal by us.”
To the Rescue
Last month, at Finch’s horse rescue headquarters south of Houston, an anonymous tip arrived: a horse in a nearby backyard looked dirty, lethargic and malnourished. A Texas judge issued an order to seize the animal and dispatched a “squad car,” which was followed by Finch and Habitat’s trailer-rigged F-350. The entourage stopped at a cheerful barn painted with a Texas flag. At the back of the lot stood the horse, a 13-hand dun with protruding hip bones and a shaggy coat caked in mud. As Finch approached holding a halter, the gelding (a castrated male horse) bolted for a gate, fell to the ground and shakily lifted himself. Finch wrapped its neck with a lead rope. “They really can’t come any skinnier than this,” said Jennifer Sylvester, who manages Finch’s ranch. “Well, I guess they can, maybe when they’re dead.”
The horse, Shorty, was so skinny that if he’d been taken to a slaughterhouse it would probably refuse him, says Finch. Unloaded at a temporary foster home, Shorty ravenously mouthed up an expensive snack of high-fiber bet pulp and alfalfa cubes, the only thing tolerable by his ingrown teeth and fragile stomach. Finch would soon be granted permanent custody of the horse under Texas animal cruelty law, but already, the price of caring for it was adding up. Rehabilitating Shorty over the next six months would cost more than $3,000. “And if we’re lucky,” says Finch, “we will get $300 out of it in adoption fees.”
Finch’s rescue network includes 168 foster homes spread across three states. It cares for 300 horses at a time, and yet Finch is the first to admit that taking all of the region’s unwanted horses is impossible. For every Shorty that Finch accepts, he has to turn away several perfectly healthy horses that are no longer wanted by their owners.
“We can take care of what we have,” he says, “but we are pretty much maxed out at the ranch.”
America’s bumper crop of equine orphans—a product of over-breeding and fickle hobbyists—is the main reason the American Quarterhorse Association, the American Veterinary Medical Association and even some horse rescue groups don’t oppose the horse slaughterhouses. “I think we have to use a little horse sense,” says Donna Ewing. She’s the 71-year-old founder of the nation’s oldest horse rescue group, the Illinois-based Hooved Animal Humane Society. “Where are they going to get the money to give these animals the quality of life they deserve?”
Even Finch admits that a ban on horse slaughter probably won’t save the lives of every unwanted horse. Instead, it’s likely to force horse owners to pay veterinarians to euthanize them and rendering companies to dispose of them. Finch believes euthanasia is more humane than slaughter, but it’s also more expensive. Vets charge between $75 and $150 to put down a horse. Disposing of the carcass, when it can’t be buried, costs $250 or more. Sending a horse to slaughter nets a horse owner roughly $500 for a mid-sized animal.
Take the slaughter option away, Ewing says, and horse abuse cases such as Shorty’s will spike. Rather than pay to dispose of unwanted horses, some owners will turn them loose in the wild or leave them to die slow, agonizing deaths at pasture.
But despite the logical appeal of the “unwanted horse theory,” as it is sometimes known, it’s thus far unsubstantiated. California, the only major state with a slaughter ban, doesn’t keep stats on horse abuse. The closest thing to a study on the theory was done by Holland, the Virginia computer programmer, who analyzed what happened after a fire idled the horse slaughterhouse in DeKalb for nearly three years.
Accounting for slaughterhouses in Texas and Canada picking up some of the plant’s business, he estimated 50,000 horses were nonetheless saved from slaughter even as horse abuse cases in Illinois declined. Anecdotal reports from California back up Holland’s assertion that the “unwanted horse theory” is a myth. Carolyn Stull, a UC Davis animal welfare expert, found no increase in horse abuse cases since the ban.
Still, the evidence is far from conclusive. Even Holland concedes horse abuse will jump wildly year-to-year based on other factors such as rainfall and temperature. And Stull wonders if California is just outsourcing its problems. The state’s slaughter ban includes few provisions for monitoring what happens to horses after they cross state lines, and no aid for horse care. A recent seizure of more than 600 emaciated mustangs from a ranch overwhelmed the state’s rescue groups, which had to export many of them to already strapped adoption agencies across the U.S.
Ewing fears a national horse slaughter ban will send meat horses on arduous treks to auctions in Canada and Mexico. Stiff horse export fees and inspection requirements—totalling at least $70 per head—will probably significantly limit the practice, but even outspoken slaughter foes say it might sometimes happen.
Ewing counsels caution. “Until we have a better solution,” she says, “I think we’d better pull back, because we are going to cause more cruelty by stopping the slaughterhouses.”
Horses for Sale
Cathleen Haggerty sat in the chipped wooden bleachers of the Great Western Trading Company horse auction in Magnolia, Texas and twisted her hands in agonized speculation over which noble steeds might soon be dinner. A diminutive and wide-eyed horse—Haggerty called it a mustang—bolted into the auction pen and nearly bowled over a teenager. Haggerty glanced at a man in the audience who she called Santa Claus, a horse buyer in a sweat-stained cowboy hat and a bushy white beard, associated in her mind with the St. Nick of coal and switches.
“No one else is going to buy him,” she fretted.
Between machine-gun babble the auctioneer spat quotes like a penny stock ticker. $75, $100, $125. He paused and offered the horse the best compliment he could muster: “Project for somebody.” Haggerty squirmed in her seat. “All in, all done, hundred quarter, hundred half, dickadickadickadeedaa,” he slammed a gavel. “Sell ‘em hundred and a quarter and put him on 3523.”
“He just—shit!—A killer just got him,” Haggerty gasped.
Santa Claus bought the horse for well below 35 cents per pound—the “meat price” offered by the slaughterhouses.
At least 30 mustangs have ended up as slabs of flesh since a new federal law last year began requiring the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to collect wild horses older than 11 years and sell them. Responding to public outrage, the BLM created a contract that is supposed to prohibit buyers from sending the horses to slaughter, at least directly. But mustangs can be difficult to train, says Jill Starr, president of Lifesavers Wild Horse Rescue. “There aren’t places for these horses to go.”
Experience adopting other high-risk horses is similarly mixed. Haggerty, a registered nurse, has spent much of her own time and money rescuing horses that are byproducts of the pharmaceuticals industry. The drug Premarin, used to treat the symptoms of menopause, is produced from the urine of impregnated mares. In 2002, when the drug was found by the National Institutes of Health to cause increased risk of heart disease, breast cancer and other ailments, many stables sold off their stocks of Premarin mares. Overwhelmed rescue groups couldn’t keep them from slaughter. Yet Haggerty thinks the market for the horses has since evolved. “Once the word got out that they can jump and they’re nice riding horses,” she says, “then people decided to bite the bullet and rescue them.”
Racehorse rescue efforts have also seen modest improvements. Spurred by outrage that Ferdinand, winner of the 1986 Kentucky Derby, was most likely slaughtered in Japan in 2002, the New York Racing Association last year created the Ferdinand Fee, an optional donation program to help keep old racehorses alive. Nonetheless, rescue groups estimate up to 6,000 racehorses in the United States are still slaughtered each year; they’re too hot tempered or decrepit to become pleasure horses. “Racing takes its toll on them,” says Diana Pikulski, executive director of the Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation. She’s trying to make the Ferdinand Fee mandatory.
Overall, expanded horse rescue efforts are one reason the number of horses slaughtered in the U.S. has fallen sharply since 1990, when more than 300,000 were killed. Another reason is the expiration of Reagan-era tax benefits that encouraged the breeding of thoroughbred horses.
Even so, slaughter menaces some horses that are well-trained and even well-loved by their owners. In 2004, Cimaron, a young Morab gelding owned by 13-year-old Sky Dutchner of upstate New York, was stolen. Months of searching by the watchdog group Stolen Horse International found he’d been shipped north along the so-called “torture trail” to Quebec and slaughtered. Debbie Metcalf, the group’s founder, estimates that 40,000 horses are stolen in the U.S. annually.
“The thieves are looking for somebody to fence them pretty fast,” Metcalf says. Slaughterhouses can be ready buyers, but they’re required by law to check horses against a list of steeds that have been reported stolen. Branding a horse and implanting it with a small tracking microchip drastically improves the chances of recovering it. “It will be awfully hard to remove a microchip,” Metcalf says. “The average thief is not going to do that.”
Many slaughter foes fear kill buyers are outbidding other potential purchasers, making horses worth more in sausages than under saddles. But Haggerty, though anti-slaughter, has attended numerous auctions in Texas and never seen a pleasure horse buyer outbid. In fact, the costs of caring for an equine—at least $3,000 a year—quickly outstrip the purchase price. “If you can’t afford to pay a thousand dollars for a good riding horse, minimum,” Ewing says, “then you cannot afford to keep that horse.”
Still, the path an unwanted horse takes to slaughter is often poorly understood by its original owners. Texas law requires notices at auctions to inform sellers that their horses could be bought for meat. No such sign was visible at the Magnolia auction; owner Don Edwards said no kill buyers work there. He said Santa Claus is a cattle trader. Yet many livestock traders re-sell horses to kill buyers if no other takers bite. The ambiguity of such wheeling and dealing suits many horse owners, who might suspect yet don’t want to know that selling their kid’s old pony is leaving blood on their hands.
Mayor Paula Bacon of Kaufman, home of Dallas Crown: “My community has just been a doormat for this,” she says. “Horse slaughter is not a service; it’s abuse.”
©Josh Harkinson
Finch encourages horse owners who can’t find homes for their animals to simply put them down. “It is very difficult to turn somebody away,” he says, “but I always try to tell people that euthanasia is the best option. Don’t send them to slaughter.”
From the horse’s point of view, however, being sold at the block may turn out better than being “humanely” killed. Even the most tattered Black Beauty dumped at auction has a small chance of finding a loving owner. The slaughterhouses in some ways help keep hope alive for these down-and-out steeds. Knowing the animals can always be sold at a profit for meat enables horse traders to buy them and first shop around elsewhere for higher bidders. Euthanasia, as an alternative, leaves no room for luck except in the afterlife.
Beyond Saving
Suzy’s owners wanted to keep the mare’s newborn foal, but they didn’t want to keep Suzy. By the time she gave birth in August, all four of her hooves had decayed down to her leg bones, a painful condition known as foundering. The owners didn’t want to send the 20-year-old palomino to slaughter, yet didn’t want to pay to put her down. They gave her to Finch. “This was, I think, somewhat of a typical situation,” he says.
Finch’s vet worked on Suzy’s feet for two weeks, but her case was hopeless. So in lieu of treatment Finch plied the ailing horse with apple slices, carrots and peppermint candies. “Why not?” he said. “Spoil ‘em rotten.” Meanwhile, a backhoe dug a ditch. And in the morning, Finch led the limping horse to the edge of her grave.
As usual, Finch encouraged most Habitat for Horses volunteers to stay away. He didn’t want their sobbing to upset the horse. Wielded by his vet, a 14-gauge needle pierced Suzy’s neck and pumped a syringe of Ace through her blood system. The sedative induced sleep. Suzy remained standing, swaying slightly, as Finch rubbed her neck and everyone cried. Then all of them stepped back. The next injection—60 cubic centimeters of sodium pentobarbital—would stop Suzy’s heart. Sometimes horses lunge dangerously as their organs shudder to a halt. Suzy simply keeled over, gasped a few times, and stopped breathing.
The 73 horses put down on Finch’s ranch all died in peaceful surroundings among people who cared for them. Unlike horses that are slaughtered, they were “very, very comfortable,” he says. “There is no terror, no fear.”
But not all veterinarians are so sure. After horses are injected with euthanasia drugs, “there is a period of time when they are going through the process of dying,” says Bill Moyer, head of the large animal department of the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine. “What we don’t know is exactly what is going through their heads at that time.”
Moyer and other vets are most concerned about environmental impacts of euthanasia. Unlike horsemeat from slaughterhouses, which can also be made into dog food, horse carcasses laced with sodium pentobarbital are poisonous. Burying them in some states is illegal. The ambivalence of the Humane Society of the U.S. (HSUS) towards the practice is relatively rare. “Most other countries think we are spoiled beyond belief,” Moyer says.
HSUS spokesperson Nancy Perry says horse owners who are concerned about the environmental impacts or cost of chemical euthanasia should, instead of sending a horse to a slaughterhouse, shoot it in the head. “A very well-placed gunshot is the only other acceptable option for them,” she says.
But a blast to the brain with a .45 is essentially the same as the “captive bolt” technology used by the slaughterhouses. Both kill a horse instantly. The American Veterinary Medical Association’s 2002 panel on euthanasia approved the captive bolt method as humane, “if done properly,” said panel chair Bonnie Beaver. And, she adds, the chances of a trained slaughterhouse worker screwing up under the watch of a government inspector and the threat of a fine are probably miniscule compared to the average bubba misfiring his Magnum in a stable.
Still, HSUS has ignored the Cheney factor in favor of calling slaughterhouse kill skills “careless and improper.” The closest thing the group produces to corroborating evidence is a widely circulated 1993 video taken inside a slaughterhouse that shows the thrashing body of a bolted horse. It is almost certainly undergoing a painless nerve reaction, Beaver says, similar to the flapping of a decapitated chicken.
In the end, the best argument against the slaughterhouses is probably their refusal to open their doors to the press. Hardly any unbiased observers have seen them operate. HSUS discounts veterinarians as beholden to livestock and rancher interests. Veterinarians say HSUS is making a big deal out of nothing to raise donations from a gullible public. Ewing of Illinois, one of very few horse rescue people to see the inside of a plant, is despised by much of the rescue community as a Benedict Arnold. “I saw absolutely nothing inhumane about the handling or the killing,” she says.
In fact, Ewing’s biggest concern about horse slaughter isn’t the slaughter itself, but how the horses get to the slaughterhouses. Wayne Pacelle, president of HSUS, points out that horses are “flight animals,” and when held in confinement for long periods of time suffer much more than similarly transported cows, pigs and chickens. USDA rules permit horses to be shipped for 28 hours straight without nourishment. Yet for healthy privately owned horses—usually towed in much more comfortable trailers—vets recommend offloading for food and water every four hours. Making that kind of requirement for meat horses would probably be so costly that it would end long distance hauling.
Finch hopes such a rule would also end horse slaughter altogether, but Ewing says she has a better idea. Instead of shutting down horse slaughterhouses, she suggests building more of them. Cut down the travel time for horses by building a state-of-the-art, humane slaughterhouse in every large state. The meat sales would pay them off. The service would save horse owners money and probably reduce abuse cases, she believes. Whether worms in the ground or Frenchmen eat the horses doesn’t concern Ewing.
“What happens to their body is OK,” she says. “It’s the soul I worry about. It’s the horse that’s alive that can feel and think. It’s how they are treated then that is important.” But when it comes to horses, the fate of both body and soul remain hotly contested.
JOSH HARKINSON, a former E intern, is a reporter for the Houston Press. This article was prepared in cooperation with that paper, which is running it simultaneously.
Animal Rights Group Holds Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa Personally Responsible for L.A. Zoo Elephant – Gita’s - Death
A good idea since the mayor was aware of the issues that occur when you keep an animal like an elephant in completely inadequate conditions.
As the article states, “Gita suffered from chronic foot problems and arthritis -- the two leading causes of death in captive elephants.”
Essentially, standing on unnaturally hard, non-native surfaces WILL cause problems what will lead to death.
Article:
Animal Rights Group Holds Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa Personally Responsible for L.A. Zoo Elephant Death
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060613/latu086.html?.v=57
Tuesday June 13, 12:31 pm ET
LOS ANGELES, June 13 /PRNewswire/ -- Gita, the 48 year old Asian elephant at the LA Zoo, died early Saturday morning as a direct result of keeping her in inadequate conditions at the zoo. Gita suffered from chronic foot problems and arthritis -- the two leading causes of death in captive elephants.
Last Chance for Animals (LCA) is holding Mayor Villaraigosa personally responsible for Gita's death. "Gita is dead because the mayor did not have the strength and conviction to make a compassionate and intelligent decision for the elephants and the people of Los Angeles," stated Chris DeRose, President of LCA. The mayor had the opportunity to veto the LA City Council decision last April to expand the existing elephant exhibit (at a cost of over $38.7 million tax payer dollars) and send the elephants to PAWS sanctuary in Northern California. The Mayor did not veto the decision even though during his election campaign and tenure he had been quoted, "A zoo is not an appropriate place for an animal as large as an elephant ... we need to move the elephants out" NBC News 5.13.05 and "My interest is in ensuring our elephants are healthy and safe and I believe they are safer when they are not in zoos" Daily News 3.11.06.
It is evident that the L.A. Zoo cannot provide the space, exercise or social enrichment needed to preserve the remaining two elephants' health and well being. The elephants are kept in woefully inadequate quarters and are forced to stand on hard surfaces such as concrete or hard-packed earth, the same conditions that caused Gita's ailments and subsequent death. As the world's largest land mammal, elephants in the wild typically walk up to 40 miles per day, socialize in groups of at least 12 members and live to over 70 years of age.
In a city with so many complex needs, the funding necessary (at least $38.7 million) to build the proposed expanded elephant exhibit at the Los Angeles Zoo could most certainly find a better use. Given the overwhelming costs associated with holding elephants and the inability to provide adequate living conditions in captivity, zoos across the country have shut down their elephant exhibits. Zoos in large metropolitan areas such as San Francisco, Detroit, Chicago and New York are beginning to understand the needs of elephants are much better met at a sanctuary.
For more information, please visit the fightback4elephants.com or LCAnimal.org or call:
Lisa Beal
Campaigns Department
LCA
Office: 310.271.6096 x27, cell: 818.681.3672
As the article states, “Gita suffered from chronic foot problems and arthritis -- the two leading causes of death in captive elephants.”
Essentially, standing on unnaturally hard, non-native surfaces WILL cause problems what will lead to death.
Article:
Animal Rights Group Holds Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa Personally Responsible for L.A. Zoo Elephant Death
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060613/latu086.html?.v=57
Tuesday June 13, 12:31 pm ET
LOS ANGELES, June 13 /PRNewswire/ -- Gita, the 48 year old Asian elephant at the LA Zoo, died early Saturday morning as a direct result of keeping her in inadequate conditions at the zoo. Gita suffered from chronic foot problems and arthritis -- the two leading causes of death in captive elephants.
Last Chance for Animals (LCA) is holding Mayor Villaraigosa personally responsible for Gita's death. "Gita is dead because the mayor did not have the strength and conviction to make a compassionate and intelligent decision for the elephants and the people of Los Angeles," stated Chris DeRose, President of LCA. The mayor had the opportunity to veto the LA City Council decision last April to expand the existing elephant exhibit (at a cost of over $38.7 million tax payer dollars) and send the elephants to PAWS sanctuary in Northern California. The Mayor did not veto the decision even though during his election campaign and tenure he had been quoted, "A zoo is not an appropriate place for an animal as large as an elephant ... we need to move the elephants out" NBC News 5.13.05 and "My interest is in ensuring our elephants are healthy and safe and I believe they are safer when they are not in zoos" Daily News 3.11.06.
It is evident that the L.A. Zoo cannot provide the space, exercise or social enrichment needed to preserve the remaining two elephants' health and well being. The elephants are kept in woefully inadequate quarters and are forced to stand on hard surfaces such as concrete or hard-packed earth, the same conditions that caused Gita's ailments and subsequent death. As the world's largest land mammal, elephants in the wild typically walk up to 40 miles per day, socialize in groups of at least 12 members and live to over 70 years of age.
In a city with so many complex needs, the funding necessary (at least $38.7 million) to build the proposed expanded elephant exhibit at the Los Angeles Zoo could most certainly find a better use. Given the overwhelming costs associated with holding elephants and the inability to provide adequate living conditions in captivity, zoos across the country have shut down their elephant exhibits. Zoos in large metropolitan areas such as San Francisco, Detroit, Chicago and New York are beginning to understand the needs of elephants are much better met at a sanctuary.
For more information, please visit the fightback4elephants.com or LCAnimal.org or call:
Lisa Beal
Campaigns Department
LCA
Office: 310.271.6096 x27, cell: 818.681.3672
A Nice Summation of How Those Pretty Host Finches, Canaries, Mynah Birds and Members of the Parrot Family Get To You: Illegally and/Or Cruelly
Here is a nice summation of how those pretty host finches, canaries, mynah birds and members of the parrot family get to you: “As a business its turnover is claimed to rival illegal drugs and arms, and it devastates swaths of tropical forest, each year claiming the lives of hundreds of thousands of exotic wild birds. And, say its opponents, those that do survive the crude techniques employed by the low-paid trappers are forced to endure journeys of thousands of miles crammed in to filthy, overcrowded cages.”
Never thought that those birds came illegally? Well, likely they did. Or, at least they came via cruel means.
Article:
EU urged not to lift its ban on 'cruel' import of wild birds
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article994057.ece
By Jonathan Brown
Published: 14 June 2006
As a business its turnover is claimed to rival illegal drugs and arms, and it devastates swaths of tropical forest, each year claiming the lives of hundreds of thousands of exotic wild birds. And, say its opponents, those that do survive the crude techniques employed by the low-paid trappers are forced to endure journeys of thousands of miles crammed in to filthy, overcrowded cages.
Tomorrow in Brussels, vets from the European Union will consider whether to recommend the lifting of the temporary ban on importing wild birds, introduced at the height of last year's scare over avian flu.
A new report by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals claims to show that the EU ban has led to the collapse of the trade in wild birds in some parts of the world. It says that captive breeders closer to home have stepped in to fill the void, enjoying rising prices for their stock, and that, far from driving the trade underground, seizures of illegally imported birds have almost ceased.
According to David Bowles, the RSPCA's head of external affairs, the lesson learnt over the past months is simple: "There was this rumour going around that bans don't work. Our work shows that they do and that they are easy to enforce," he said.
Following a similar ban imposed in the United States in 1992, Europe has accounted for 93 per cent of the global avian trade protected under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) - a total of 2.7 million birds between 2000 and 2003. Britain remains one of the most lucrative markets - it is estimated 1.37 million households host finches, canaries, mynah birds and members of the parrot family - though not all are imported from the wild.
For every 10 birds finally sold, as many as six are thought to have died en route, it is claimed.
"The scale and degree of cruelty in this wasteful trade is wholly unacceptable. Legislation outlaws the capture of wild native birds within the EU. Yet the EU continues to fuel the international trade even though captive bred birds are readily available. Millions of birds have died or suffered as a direct result of these double standards," said Mr Bowles.
The RSPCA sent undercover investigators to Ghana, a country at the heart of the west African export trade. They found that the introduction of the ban had had a minimal effect on the trappers, who tended to use wild birds as a secondary source of income. Many had diversified into other jobs, with some switching to collecting reptiles, another potential wildlife problem.
Research found that the trappers were the lowest paid in the supply chain, with the lion's share going to the retailers in the developed world. In the Chaco region of Argentina, for example, trappers earn just $7 (£4) per bird, birds which sell for $400 in Europe. One example found that the very rarest birds, Spinx's macaw chicks, could command prices up to $40,000.
Trapping techniques include the gluing of birds to branches, netting, lassoing and simply plucking birds from nests or knocking them forcibly into water.
Les Rance, of the Parrot Society UK, said that even though many of his members were against the wild bird trade, African countries relied on it as a legal source of foreign revenue. "The importation is fairly well regulated in this country through customs and Defra. No one wants to be cruel to birds coming into this country, either importers or breeders."
The vets' recommendations will be put to EU ministers in July.
Never thought that those birds came illegally? Well, likely they did. Or, at least they came via cruel means.
Article:
EU urged not to lift its ban on 'cruel' import of wild birds
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article994057.ece
By Jonathan Brown
Published: 14 June 2006
As a business its turnover is claimed to rival illegal drugs and arms, and it devastates swaths of tropical forest, each year claiming the lives of hundreds of thousands of exotic wild birds. And, say its opponents, those that do survive the crude techniques employed by the low-paid trappers are forced to endure journeys of thousands of miles crammed in to filthy, overcrowded cages.
Tomorrow in Brussels, vets from the European Union will consider whether to recommend the lifting of the temporary ban on importing wild birds, introduced at the height of last year's scare over avian flu.
A new report by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals claims to show that the EU ban has led to the collapse of the trade in wild birds in some parts of the world. It says that captive breeders closer to home have stepped in to fill the void, enjoying rising prices for their stock, and that, far from driving the trade underground, seizures of illegally imported birds have almost ceased.
According to David Bowles, the RSPCA's head of external affairs, the lesson learnt over the past months is simple: "There was this rumour going around that bans don't work. Our work shows that they do and that they are easy to enforce," he said.
Following a similar ban imposed in the United States in 1992, Europe has accounted for 93 per cent of the global avian trade protected under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) - a total of 2.7 million birds between 2000 and 2003. Britain remains one of the most lucrative markets - it is estimated 1.37 million households host finches, canaries, mynah birds and members of the parrot family - though not all are imported from the wild.
For every 10 birds finally sold, as many as six are thought to have died en route, it is claimed.
"The scale and degree of cruelty in this wasteful trade is wholly unacceptable. Legislation outlaws the capture of wild native birds within the EU. Yet the EU continues to fuel the international trade even though captive bred birds are readily available. Millions of birds have died or suffered as a direct result of these double standards," said Mr Bowles.
The RSPCA sent undercover investigators to Ghana, a country at the heart of the west African export trade. They found that the introduction of the ban had had a minimal effect on the trappers, who tended to use wild birds as a secondary source of income. Many had diversified into other jobs, with some switching to collecting reptiles, another potential wildlife problem.
Research found that the trappers were the lowest paid in the supply chain, with the lion's share going to the retailers in the developed world. In the Chaco region of Argentina, for example, trappers earn just $7 (£4) per bird, birds which sell for $400 in Europe. One example found that the very rarest birds, Spinx's macaw chicks, could command prices up to $40,000.
Trapping techniques include the gluing of birds to branches, netting, lassoing and simply plucking birds from nests or knocking them forcibly into water.
Les Rance, of the Parrot Society UK, said that even though many of his members were against the wild bird trade, African countries relied on it as a legal source of foreign revenue. "The importation is fairly well regulated in this country through customs and Defra. No one wants to be cruel to birds coming into this country, either importers or breeders."
The vets' recommendations will be put to EU ministers in July.
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
Tropical Storm Alberto Makes Landfall / NOLA Pet Evacuation Plan Needs Volunteers
With Alberto’s landfall about 50 miles southeast of Tallahasse, Florida,
hurricane season is officially here! So far an estimated 20,000 people have
evacuated and animal rescue teams are on alert. Fortunately we have Capt.
Ron -- of Humane Law Enforcement-Florida, Disaster Response Teams, and the
Pet Owners Alliance Inc. -- on the Florida front. (See Capt. Ron’s Alberto
report at end of email).
We need to step up the pet evacuation process for vulnerable Gulf Coast
states such as Louisiana. The LA-SPCA is currently working to “fill in the
gaps” with state and federal officials. BUT THEY NEED YOUR HELP.
Volunteers are sought, right now, for NOLA’s pet evacuation plan. We had
posted this alert earlier, but the response has been poor...
If you can help, or can cross-post this to other lists, please do so.
DIRECT QUESTIONS TO:
Laura Maloney of the LA-SPCA,
Laura@la-spca.org
and
ginger@la-spca.org
504-368-5191, ext. 142
hurricane season is officially here! So far an estimated 20,000 people have
evacuated and animal rescue teams are on alert. Fortunately we have Capt.
Ron -- of Humane Law Enforcement-Florida, Disaster Response Teams, and the
Pet Owners Alliance Inc. -- on the Florida front. (See Capt. Ron’s Alberto
report at end of email).
We need to step up the pet evacuation process for vulnerable Gulf Coast
states such as Louisiana. The LA-SPCA is currently working to “fill in the
gaps” with state and federal officials. BUT THEY NEED YOUR HELP.
Volunteers are sought, right now, for NOLA’s pet evacuation plan. We had
posted this alert earlier, but the response has been poor...
If you can help, or can cross-post this to other lists, please do so.
DIRECT QUESTIONS TO:
Laura Maloney of the LA-SPCA,
Laura@la-spca.org
and
ginger@la-spca.org
504-368-5191, ext. 142
The National Lawyers Guild Condemns FBI’s Operation Backfire “Green Scare” Tactics as an Unconstitutional Abuse of Authority
Zealous Targeting of Animal and Environmental Activists.
This is an incredible article. It fully exposes the ridiculous extremism exhibited by the FBI and the US government in relation to targeting peaceful animal rights and environmental activists. In summation:
“In 2004, the federal government launched Operation Backfire, a wide-scale investigation of environmental and animal rights activists. It used paid informants and conducted warrantless spying on a range of organizations.”
“[A]n orchestrated campaign of issuing subpoenas to environmental activists, conducting large scale roundups of activists, levying unprecedented penalties for property crimes, and using threats of severe sanctions to leverage fear of conviction and force individuals to turn state’s evidence.”
The National Lawyers Guild sees this program as so ridiculous and extreme that it actually “has established a hotline, 888-NLG-ECOLAW, for individuals arrested or subpoenaed for offenses related to environmental or animal activism. The hotline will be operational on June 26.”
Besides the obvious, the scary thing here is that even with the NLG backing up peaceful protesters exercising their constitutional rights, the courts are so stacked with political appointments by business-focused politicians that really, in the long run, unless serious changes occur, these actions will be allowed.
Article:
FBI’s Operation Backfire Unconstitutional, Lawyers
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO0606/S00307.htm
Wednesday, 14 June 2006, 10:10 pm
Press Release: US National Lawyers Guild
National Lawyers Guild Condemns FBI’s Operation Backfire As Unconstitutional
Legal Hotline Available for Activists
Educational Symposium Scheduled for Attorneys and Law Students
New York. The National Lawyers Guild condemns the FBI’s Operation Backfire “green scare” tactics as an unconstitutional abuse of authority. The FBI has engaged in an orchestrated campaign of issuing subpoenas to environmental activists, conducting large scale roundups of activists, levying unprecedented penalties for property crimes, and using threats of severe sanctions to leverage fear of conviction and force individuals to turn state’s evidence.
In 2004, the federal government launched Operation Backfire, a wide-scale investigation of environmental and animal rights activists. It used paid informants and conducted warrantless spying on a range of organizations. Since then, numerous individuals around the country have been arrested and charged with arson, destruction of property and conspiracy in the government’s attempts to target the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and the Animal Liberation Front (ALF). Others were subpoenaed to testify before grand juries. Some were charged with the use of “destructive devices,” one count of which carries a mandatory 30-year sentence—two counts call for mandatory life in prison. The government is over-charging people with offenses that carry severe sanctions to force them to accept guilty pleas for a lower sentence or to intimidate them into turning state’s evidence. The National Lawyers Guild believes that the government is misusing destructive device charges and engaging in selection prosecution.
For example, in the SHAC7 (Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty) case the government in 2004 prosecuted the administrators of a website, charging them with ‘conspiracy’ to violate the Animal Enterprise Protection Act, an industry-specific statute that provides harsher sentences for those protesting animal-related businesses than say those protesting women’s health clinics. The Animal Enterprise Protection Act is a clear violation of the First Amendment, as it makes certain types of political speech illegal. Three of the SHAC7 defendants were found guilty only of conspiracy, a charge that is rarely prosecuted without a substantive offense connected to it.
ADVERTISEMENT
“In the past few years, the Guild has witnessed a disturbing trend of targeting protesters engaged in dissent, and in imposing draconian sentences for expressing such dissent. Life sentences for property damage offenses where the actor has no intent to harm an individual are simply unconstitutional—the punishment does not fit the crime,” said Heidi Boghosian, Executive Director of the National Lawyers Guild.
The FBI rates ALF and ELF as the number one domestic terrorist threat, calling eco-sabotage the government’s top domestic terrorism priority. The State Department’s definition of terrorism is: "premeditated politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatants." The expanded definition of domestic terrorism in the Patriot Act punishes a person who commits a dangerous criminal act intended to “intimidate or coerce a civilian population.” The Guild is greatly concerned about the use of the word terrorism because it obfuscates issues about the evidence and the ability to fairly evaluate the merits of the case.
The National Lawyers Guild has established a hotline, 888-NLG-ECOLAW, for individuals arrested or subpoenaed for offenses related to environmental or animal activism. The hotline will be operational on June 26. Also on June 26, the Guild will hold a symposium, “The Green Scare: What Lawyers Need to Know,” at Cardozo Law School in New York, New York, at 6:30pm. Speakers include Lauren Regan, founder and executive director of the Civil Liberties Defense Center in Oregon; Andrew Erba, attorney for one of the SHAC7 defendants, Brendan Story of Friends and Family of Daniel McGowan, and New York civil rights attorney Daniel Meyers.
This is an incredible article. It fully exposes the ridiculous extremism exhibited by the FBI and the US government in relation to targeting peaceful animal rights and environmental activists. In summation:
“In 2004, the federal government launched Operation Backfire, a wide-scale investigation of environmental and animal rights activists. It used paid informants and conducted warrantless spying on a range of organizations.”
“[A]n orchestrated campaign of issuing subpoenas to environmental activists, conducting large scale roundups of activists, levying unprecedented penalties for property crimes, and using threats of severe sanctions to leverage fear of conviction and force individuals to turn state’s evidence.”
The National Lawyers Guild sees this program as so ridiculous and extreme that it actually “has established a hotline, 888-NLG-ECOLAW, for individuals arrested or subpoenaed for offenses related to environmental or animal activism. The hotline will be operational on June 26.”
Besides the obvious, the scary thing here is that even with the NLG backing up peaceful protesters exercising their constitutional rights, the courts are so stacked with political appointments by business-focused politicians that really, in the long run, unless serious changes occur, these actions will be allowed.
Article:
FBI’s Operation Backfire Unconstitutional, Lawyers
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO0606/S00307.htm
Wednesday, 14 June 2006, 10:10 pm
Press Release: US National Lawyers Guild
National Lawyers Guild Condemns FBI’s Operation Backfire As Unconstitutional
Legal Hotline Available for Activists
Educational Symposium Scheduled for Attorneys and Law Students
New York. The National Lawyers Guild condemns the FBI’s Operation Backfire “green scare” tactics as an unconstitutional abuse of authority. The FBI has engaged in an orchestrated campaign of issuing subpoenas to environmental activists, conducting large scale roundups of activists, levying unprecedented penalties for property crimes, and using threats of severe sanctions to leverage fear of conviction and force individuals to turn state’s evidence.
In 2004, the federal government launched Operation Backfire, a wide-scale investigation of environmental and animal rights activists. It used paid informants and conducted warrantless spying on a range of organizations. Since then, numerous individuals around the country have been arrested and charged with arson, destruction of property and conspiracy in the government’s attempts to target the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and the Animal Liberation Front (ALF). Others were subpoenaed to testify before grand juries. Some were charged with the use of “destructive devices,” one count of which carries a mandatory 30-year sentence—two counts call for mandatory life in prison. The government is over-charging people with offenses that carry severe sanctions to force them to accept guilty pleas for a lower sentence or to intimidate them into turning state’s evidence. The National Lawyers Guild believes that the government is misusing destructive device charges and engaging in selection prosecution.
For example, in the SHAC7 (Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty) case the government in 2004 prosecuted the administrators of a website, charging them with ‘conspiracy’ to violate the Animal Enterprise Protection Act, an industry-specific statute that provides harsher sentences for those protesting animal-related businesses than say those protesting women’s health clinics. The Animal Enterprise Protection Act is a clear violation of the First Amendment, as it makes certain types of political speech illegal. Three of the SHAC7 defendants were found guilty only of conspiracy, a charge that is rarely prosecuted without a substantive offense connected to it.
ADVERTISEMENT
“In the past few years, the Guild has witnessed a disturbing trend of targeting protesters engaged in dissent, and in imposing draconian sentences for expressing such dissent. Life sentences for property damage offenses where the actor has no intent to harm an individual are simply unconstitutional—the punishment does not fit the crime,” said Heidi Boghosian, Executive Director of the National Lawyers Guild.
The FBI rates ALF and ELF as the number one domestic terrorist threat, calling eco-sabotage the government’s top domestic terrorism priority. The State Department’s definition of terrorism is: "premeditated politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatants." The expanded definition of domestic terrorism in the Patriot Act punishes a person who commits a dangerous criminal act intended to “intimidate or coerce a civilian population.” The Guild is greatly concerned about the use of the word terrorism because it obfuscates issues about the evidence and the ability to fairly evaluate the merits of the case.
The National Lawyers Guild has established a hotline, 888-NLG-ECOLAW, for individuals arrested or subpoenaed for offenses related to environmental or animal activism. The hotline will be operational on June 26. Also on June 26, the Guild will hold a symposium, “The Green Scare: What Lawyers Need to Know,” at Cardozo Law School in New York, New York, at 6:30pm. Speakers include Lauren Regan, founder and executive director of the Civil Liberties Defense Center in Oregon; Andrew Erba, attorney for one of the SHAC7 defendants, Brendan Story of Friends and Family of Daniel McGowan, and New York civil rights attorney Daniel Meyers.
The Ugliness and Truth of Horseracing Exposed: Unwanted Ex Racers Will End Up In Horrible Conditions and Auctioned Off For Slaughter
This issue has garnered a lot of attention lately due to the attempt to pass the American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act. You can read about this act at: http://www.hsus.org/legislation_laws/federal_legislation
/companion_animals/2005_horse_slaughter.html.
This excellent article exposes the horrible truth of what occurs to retired racers and horses in general. Like we’re so accustomed to doing in this country, if it doesn’t make money, it’s not worth respect. That is the case here, as once loved horses are put into a humiliating and hell full situation.
“The racehorses that wind up at New Holland aren't all lame, or aged, or the byproducts of uninspired breeding. Often, they are horses who consistently run out of the money and whose owners can no longer afford to support them. Horse Illustrated magazine estimates that as many as 90 percent of all racehorses will be slaughtered.”
At the end of the article is a list of some agencies for anyone interested in horse rescue or adoption. After you read this article, those with a heart certainly will have such an interest.
Article:
Awaiting retired racehorses: Salvation - or slaughter
They're unwanted and auctioned off each week.
http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/sports/14803662.htm
By Frank Fitzpatrick
Inquirer Staff Writer
NEW HOLLAND, Pa. - JJ's Max and dozens of other horses jostled flank to flank in the narrow stable like commuters on a crowded subway.
The 7-year-old standardbred's coat was as dusty as the floor. Three years after his last race, he was thinner than in his harness heyday. And though his left eye was clouded by a vision problem that ended that career, he seemed to see his fate.
His head hung low and unresponsive as Amish children in straw hats and white bonnets paraded past. He didn't react to the nervous whinnies of his companions in this dirty equine green room, or to the hands of the thick-chested men who rudely lifted his leg or yanked back a lip. Occasionally, he shuddered.
Soon, the bay gelding, who had won just 4 of 28 races and $5,666 as a second-rate pacer at Sports Creek Raceway in Flint, Mich., was untied and led next door, into the New Holland Sales Stables Inc. auction ring.
There, in a dung-scented building along Fulton Street in this 278-year-old Lancaster County borough, JJ's Max became part of the weekly New Holland auction, the largest horse sale east of the Mississippi, on June 5.
Ambling down a narrow walkway like some disinterested model, the horse was eyed by hundreds of crusty horsemen and farmers, by equestrian riders and spectators, and by the buyers and sellers who packed the wooden grandstands and narrow walkways for this long-standing Dutch Country ritual.
As horses of all sizes, breeds and ages were marched in and out of the ring, prospective buyers roamed the stables, getting a closer look at the day's later offerings. Men in plaid shirts and baseball caps ate plates of cream chipped beef piled high on homefries as they assessed the horseflesh. Women, many of them Amish, ushered groups of children through the stables, where the youngsters sometimes patted a horse's rump or tried to mount a pony.
This weekly scene, so rich in atmosphere and redolent of America's agricultural traditions, has a dark side as well, one from which, on this day, JJ's Max happily escaped.
Experts say that perhaps as many as 80 of the 400 or so horses auctioned off here each Monday, many of them former racehorses, end up in slaughterhouses, their meat bound for the restaurants of Europe and Asia.
"There are a few fools here who think these horses are going to Old MacDonald's farm," said Pennell Hopkins, an officer with the Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, who patrols the grounds each week.
According to Animal Welfare League statistics, 17 percent of the more than 80,000 horses slaughtered annually for meat in the United States are thoroughbreds. Standardbreds like JJ's Max, a much smaller percentage of the horse population, probably make up another 2 percent.
But on this cool Monday, JJ's Max, who never had much good fortune on the racetrack, was lucky.
Once he was put on display, an auctioneer bellowed the identification number affixed to the horse's flanks. He briefly described the animal and began to warble for bids that never came.
It was over in 30 seconds.
Unsold, JJ's Max was taken out back of the rickety building. A handler unchained the metal gate to pen 24-A, a dark holding area that's called the "kill-pen" because the next stop for these horses is generally not some sunny pasture.
There, Kelly Young of the Lost and Found Horse Rescue spotted him.
"He looked so sweet," she said.
Young paid his owner $350 and took JJ's Max to the York County farm where her organization has brought hundreds of horses with similar stories. She comes here each week to rescue one or more of the doomed horses, typically former racehorses.
"These horses do a lot for us in their lifetimes," Young said. "They don't deserve to die in the horrible way they do."
The not-so-fortunate horses, bought by anonymous representatives of the slaughterhouses for a few hundred dollars, are hauled to one of the three remaining U.S. facilities - two in Texas, one in Illinois - or to others in Mexico and Canada that help satisfy the growing taste for horsemeat overseas.
Diners in France, Belgium, Japan and elsewhere, unnerved by recent mad-cow-disease scares, are paying as much as $25 a pound. A 1,200-pound animal can produce a sizable profit.
Young, Hopkins and numerous animal-welfare organizations object to the cruel demise of these horses, many of whom are healthy and fit. They often end up slaughtered because they become too expensive to keep once they can't race.
In the slaughterhouses, the horses are packed into a chute and stunned before having their throats slit.
"Horses are high-strung to begin with," said Chris Heyde, deputy legislative director for the Animal Welfare League in Washington. "So you can imagine the fear they're experiencing when they're crowded together in these places that smell of blood and feces.
"Then they go through a door into what is essentially a Dumpster," Heyde said. "A man above them has a pneumatic gun with which he fires a bolt the size of a roll of quarters into the horse's brain and then retracts it. The purpose isn't to kill the animal but to render it unresponsive to pain. Sometimes the process has to be repeated four or five times before the horses are bled to death."
Their carcasses, Heyde said, are then frozen and shipped overseas.
Heyde's organization is attempting to shepherd the American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act through Congress, where it is stalled in the House's Energy and Commerce Committee.
"I think the overwhelming majority of Americans are opposed to horse slaughter. But until we get a law passed, there's not much that can be done beyond trying to rescue as many as possible," he said.
Gretchen Jackson, who owns Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro, has urged action on the measure, HR-503. In a teleconference last week, she said she and her husband cared for eight retired racehorses on their Chester County farm.
"Some are riding horses, and some aren't even up to that, and some are more than 20 years old," she said. "I just felt that when you own and breed a horse that is yours, it's your responsibility to care for that horse."
There have been some positive recent developments in efforts to save racehorses from slaughter. Rescue groups like Young's and the Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation are becoming more prevalent. And both the National Thoroughbred Racing Association and the U.S. Trotting Association have been actively supporting these efforts.
"Our biggest [standardbred] adoption group has placed about 2,000 horses since 1990, and we have several other smaller groups that place maybe 10 to 100 each year," said Ellen Harvey, executive director of Harness Racing Communications, a division of the U.S. Trotting Association.
The racehorses that wind up at New Holland aren't all lame, or aged, or the byproducts of uninspired breeding. Often, they are horses who consistently run out of the money and whose owners can no longer afford to support them. Horse Illustrated magazine estimates that as many as 90 percent of all racehorses will be slaughtered.
Among the recognizable thoroughbreds Young has saved here are a half-brother to Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner Charismatic and a 3-year-old son of champion sire Danzig.
"It can happen to any horse," she said. "Look what happened to Ferdinand."
That 1986 Kentucky Derby winner is believed to have perished in a Japanese slaughterhouse. The New York Racing Association recently initiated a Ferdinand Fund. Bettors there can contribute to an organization that cares for retired racehorses.
While the New Holland sale's operators did not want to be interviewed, they are doing nothing illegal. Within the horse industry, theirs is a well-respected and popular auction.
Each week, anywhere from 250 to 450 horses are sold there, everything from tiny ponies to massive Clydesdales to over-the-hill thoroughbreds.
Most buyers will use the horses for simple tasks - pulling Amish buggies, pony rides, equestrian lessons. The prices they fetched on June 5 ranged from $270 to $1,850.
It's the bargains that most concern Young.
"When you see a horse go for just a few hundred dollars," she said, "there's a good chance it's going to end up in the kill-pen."
The gruesome end many of these horses are destined to meet contrasts starkly with the carnival-like atmosphere outside the auction ring here.
By 8 a.m. last Monday, the large parking lots were humming with activity.
Dozens of pickup trucks laden with straw bales, stacked like blocks on a child's wagon, lined up for a hay auction. Another area was dominated by large horse trailers, which came from as far away as Wyoming and as near as Kennett Square and Malvern.
Elsewhere, at a colorful flea market, merchants sold copies of posters promoting a 1956 Elvis Presley concert, handsome leather saddles and other tack, used sweatshirts and corn dogs.
Inside the auction's main building, a snack bar dispensed sweet bologna-and-swiss cheese platters, $1.50 root-beer floats and the popular chipped-beef plates.
"It's quite an interesting place, it really is," said Hopkins, who colleagues say often is harassed by the sellers and buyers. "But you'll also see horses that have been abused, horses that have an eye hanging out of their heads, things like that.
"It can be a place of horrors, too."
Adopt a Horse
Here are some agencies for anyone interested in horse rescue or adoption:
Thoroughbreds:Re Run. Web site is www.rerun.org.
Contact Laurie Lane
at 732-521-1370.
Canter: Web site is www.canterusa.org.
Contact Allie Conrad
at 301-980-0972.
Standardbreds: Standardbred Retirement Foundation. Web site is www.adoptahorse.org.
Contact Gen Sullivan
at 732-462-8773.
All breeds and ponies:
Lost and Found Horse Rescue. Web site is
www.lfhr.org.
Contact Kelly Young
at 717-428-9701.
Horse Lovers United.
Web site is http://www.horseloversunited.com. Contact Lorraine Truitt at 410-749-3599.
Equine Protection Network:
Web site is http://equineprotection network.com.
/companion_animals/2005_horse_slaughter.html.
This excellent article exposes the horrible truth of what occurs to retired racers and horses in general. Like we’re so accustomed to doing in this country, if it doesn’t make money, it’s not worth respect. That is the case here, as once loved horses are put into a humiliating and hell full situation.
“The racehorses that wind up at New Holland aren't all lame, or aged, or the byproducts of uninspired breeding. Often, they are horses who consistently run out of the money and whose owners can no longer afford to support them. Horse Illustrated magazine estimates that as many as 90 percent of all racehorses will be slaughtered.”
At the end of the article is a list of some agencies for anyone interested in horse rescue or adoption. After you read this article, those with a heart certainly will have such an interest.
Article:
Awaiting retired racehorses: Salvation - or slaughter
They're unwanted and auctioned off each week.
http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/sports/14803662.htm
By Frank Fitzpatrick
Inquirer Staff Writer
NEW HOLLAND, Pa. - JJ's Max and dozens of other horses jostled flank to flank in the narrow stable like commuters on a crowded subway.
The 7-year-old standardbred's coat was as dusty as the floor. Three years after his last race, he was thinner than in his harness heyday. And though his left eye was clouded by a vision problem that ended that career, he seemed to see his fate.
His head hung low and unresponsive as Amish children in straw hats and white bonnets paraded past. He didn't react to the nervous whinnies of his companions in this dirty equine green room, or to the hands of the thick-chested men who rudely lifted his leg or yanked back a lip. Occasionally, he shuddered.
Soon, the bay gelding, who had won just 4 of 28 races and $5,666 as a second-rate pacer at Sports Creek Raceway in Flint, Mich., was untied and led next door, into the New Holland Sales Stables Inc. auction ring.
There, in a dung-scented building along Fulton Street in this 278-year-old Lancaster County borough, JJ's Max became part of the weekly New Holland auction, the largest horse sale east of the Mississippi, on June 5.
Ambling down a narrow walkway like some disinterested model, the horse was eyed by hundreds of crusty horsemen and farmers, by equestrian riders and spectators, and by the buyers and sellers who packed the wooden grandstands and narrow walkways for this long-standing Dutch Country ritual.
As horses of all sizes, breeds and ages were marched in and out of the ring, prospective buyers roamed the stables, getting a closer look at the day's later offerings. Men in plaid shirts and baseball caps ate plates of cream chipped beef piled high on homefries as they assessed the horseflesh. Women, many of them Amish, ushered groups of children through the stables, where the youngsters sometimes patted a horse's rump or tried to mount a pony.
This weekly scene, so rich in atmosphere and redolent of America's agricultural traditions, has a dark side as well, one from which, on this day, JJ's Max happily escaped.
Experts say that perhaps as many as 80 of the 400 or so horses auctioned off here each Monday, many of them former racehorses, end up in slaughterhouses, their meat bound for the restaurants of Europe and Asia.
"There are a few fools here who think these horses are going to Old MacDonald's farm," said Pennell Hopkins, an officer with the Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, who patrols the grounds each week.
According to Animal Welfare League statistics, 17 percent of the more than 80,000 horses slaughtered annually for meat in the United States are thoroughbreds. Standardbreds like JJ's Max, a much smaller percentage of the horse population, probably make up another 2 percent.
But on this cool Monday, JJ's Max, who never had much good fortune on the racetrack, was lucky.
Once he was put on display, an auctioneer bellowed the identification number affixed to the horse's flanks. He briefly described the animal and began to warble for bids that never came.
It was over in 30 seconds.
Unsold, JJ's Max was taken out back of the rickety building. A handler unchained the metal gate to pen 24-A, a dark holding area that's called the "kill-pen" because the next stop for these horses is generally not some sunny pasture.
There, Kelly Young of the Lost and Found Horse Rescue spotted him.
"He looked so sweet," she said.
Young paid his owner $350 and took JJ's Max to the York County farm where her organization has brought hundreds of horses with similar stories. She comes here each week to rescue one or more of the doomed horses, typically former racehorses.
"These horses do a lot for us in their lifetimes," Young said. "They don't deserve to die in the horrible way they do."
The not-so-fortunate horses, bought by anonymous representatives of the slaughterhouses for a few hundred dollars, are hauled to one of the three remaining U.S. facilities - two in Texas, one in Illinois - or to others in Mexico and Canada that help satisfy the growing taste for horsemeat overseas.
Diners in France, Belgium, Japan and elsewhere, unnerved by recent mad-cow-disease scares, are paying as much as $25 a pound. A 1,200-pound animal can produce a sizable profit.
Young, Hopkins and numerous animal-welfare organizations object to the cruel demise of these horses, many of whom are healthy and fit. They often end up slaughtered because they become too expensive to keep once they can't race.
In the slaughterhouses, the horses are packed into a chute and stunned before having their throats slit.
"Horses are high-strung to begin with," said Chris Heyde, deputy legislative director for the Animal Welfare League in Washington. "So you can imagine the fear they're experiencing when they're crowded together in these places that smell of blood and feces.
"Then they go through a door into what is essentially a Dumpster," Heyde said. "A man above them has a pneumatic gun with which he fires a bolt the size of a roll of quarters into the horse's brain and then retracts it. The purpose isn't to kill the animal but to render it unresponsive to pain. Sometimes the process has to be repeated four or five times before the horses are bled to death."
Their carcasses, Heyde said, are then frozen and shipped overseas.
Heyde's organization is attempting to shepherd the American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act through Congress, where it is stalled in the House's Energy and Commerce Committee.
"I think the overwhelming majority of Americans are opposed to horse slaughter. But until we get a law passed, there's not much that can be done beyond trying to rescue as many as possible," he said.
Gretchen Jackson, who owns Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro, has urged action on the measure, HR-503. In a teleconference last week, she said she and her husband cared for eight retired racehorses on their Chester County farm.
"Some are riding horses, and some aren't even up to that, and some are more than 20 years old," she said. "I just felt that when you own and breed a horse that is yours, it's your responsibility to care for that horse."
There have been some positive recent developments in efforts to save racehorses from slaughter. Rescue groups like Young's and the Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation are becoming more prevalent. And both the National Thoroughbred Racing Association and the U.S. Trotting Association have been actively supporting these efforts.
"Our biggest [standardbred] adoption group has placed about 2,000 horses since 1990, and we have several other smaller groups that place maybe 10 to 100 each year," said Ellen Harvey, executive director of Harness Racing Communications, a division of the U.S. Trotting Association.
The racehorses that wind up at New Holland aren't all lame, or aged, or the byproducts of uninspired breeding. Often, they are horses who consistently run out of the money and whose owners can no longer afford to support them. Horse Illustrated magazine estimates that as many as 90 percent of all racehorses will be slaughtered.
Among the recognizable thoroughbreds Young has saved here are a half-brother to Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner Charismatic and a 3-year-old son of champion sire Danzig.
"It can happen to any horse," she said. "Look what happened to Ferdinand."
That 1986 Kentucky Derby winner is believed to have perished in a Japanese slaughterhouse. The New York Racing Association recently initiated a Ferdinand Fund. Bettors there can contribute to an organization that cares for retired racehorses.
While the New Holland sale's operators did not want to be interviewed, they are doing nothing illegal. Within the horse industry, theirs is a well-respected and popular auction.
Each week, anywhere from 250 to 450 horses are sold there, everything from tiny ponies to massive Clydesdales to over-the-hill thoroughbreds.
Most buyers will use the horses for simple tasks - pulling Amish buggies, pony rides, equestrian lessons. The prices they fetched on June 5 ranged from $270 to $1,850.
It's the bargains that most concern Young.
"When you see a horse go for just a few hundred dollars," she said, "there's a good chance it's going to end up in the kill-pen."
The gruesome end many of these horses are destined to meet contrasts starkly with the carnival-like atmosphere outside the auction ring here.
By 8 a.m. last Monday, the large parking lots were humming with activity.
Dozens of pickup trucks laden with straw bales, stacked like blocks on a child's wagon, lined up for a hay auction. Another area was dominated by large horse trailers, which came from as far away as Wyoming and as near as Kennett Square and Malvern.
Elsewhere, at a colorful flea market, merchants sold copies of posters promoting a 1956 Elvis Presley concert, handsome leather saddles and other tack, used sweatshirts and corn dogs.
Inside the auction's main building, a snack bar dispensed sweet bologna-and-swiss cheese platters, $1.50 root-beer floats and the popular chipped-beef plates.
"It's quite an interesting place, it really is," said Hopkins, who colleagues say often is harassed by the sellers and buyers. "But you'll also see horses that have been abused, horses that have an eye hanging out of their heads, things like that.
"It can be a place of horrors, too."
Adopt a Horse
Here are some agencies for anyone interested in horse rescue or adoption:
Thoroughbreds:Re Run. Web site is www.rerun.org.
Contact Laurie Lane
at 732-521-1370.
Canter: Web site is www.canterusa.org.
Contact Allie Conrad
at 301-980-0972.
Standardbreds: Standardbred Retirement Foundation. Web site is www.adoptahorse.org.
Contact Gen Sullivan
at 732-462-8773.
All breeds and ponies:
Lost and Found Horse Rescue. Web site is
www.lfhr.org.
Contact Kelly Young
at 717-428-9701.
Horse Lovers United.
Web site is http://www.horseloversunited.com. Contact Lorraine Truitt at 410-749-3599.
Equine Protection Network:
Web site is http://equineprotection network.com.
On Eve of International Whaling Commission Meeting Undercover Footage Is Released Which Proves That There Is No Humane Way to Kill a Whale At Sea
An excellent article that exposes not only the truth of whaling, but of the political backslapping that occurs to allow such inhumane and unnecessary killing to occur.
As far as I know, the footage has not been publicly released yet, but in summation:
“The footage, filmed by investigators from the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA) and the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), shows a Norwegian whaling ship firing a grenade-tipped harpoon into a minke whale. Despite the hunt taking place in perfect conditions, the whale takes some two-and-a-half minutes to die.”
So, this contradicts pro whaling countries like Japan and Norway and exposes the lies they use to justify their desires to kill whales.
Article:
New footage fuels argument of anti-whaling lobby
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO0606/S00119.htm
Tuesday, 13 June 2006, 12:28 pm
Press Release: World Society for Animals
New footage fuels welfare argument of anti-whaling lobby
As pro and anti-whalers meet in St Kitts to debate whale killing methods, new undercover footage is released which proves that there is no humane way to kill a whale at sea - even in optimum weather conditions.
The footage, filmed by investigators from the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA) and the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), shows a Norwegian whaling ship firing a grenade-tipped harpoon into a minke whale. Despite the hunt taking place in perfect conditions, the whale takes some two-and-a-half minutes to die.
The whaling vessel, 'Brandsholmben' was filmed by investigators just off the coast of Hamningberg, Norway, last month, as it pursued the whale for 25 minutes before firing at it. Accompanying the hunted whale was another whale, which made a narrow escape. This is unusual for minke whales as they are usually solitary animals except during breeding or when with a calf. It is not known what the relationship between these two whales was.
This timely release coincides with a technical workshop on whale killing methods and associated welfare issues which takes place before the opening of the 2006 meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in St Kitts.
Commenting on the footage, Leah Garcs, WSPA's Director of Campaigns, said: "Despite this hunt taking place in optimum weather conditions, the kill is not instantaneous. This would not be an acceptable 'time to death' for a farm animal, so why should it be permitted for whale? Clearly, on cruelty grounds alone, all commercial and scientific whaling should cease."
EIA spokesperson Jennifer Lonsdale, added: "This investigation once again exposes the cruelty of modern day whaling, where an animal suffers being hunted and killed by an inaccurate shot from a moving vessel. A number of uncontrollable factors such as visibility, sea conditions, speed, and gunner accuracy prevent a guaranteed lethal shot. There is simply no humane way to kill a whale at sea."
This year there is a real fear that pro-whaling nations have gathered enough support within the IWC to overturn some vital and long standing conservation and welfare measures. WSPA and EIA are members of Whalewatch, a coalition of over 140 non-governmental organisations, that campaigns to stop the unnecessary and inhumane practice of commercial and 'scientific' whaling.
Whalers will kill approximately 2,000 whales this year, taking the total death toll to over 25,000 since the ban on commercial whaling came into force in 1986.
As far as I know, the footage has not been publicly released yet, but in summation:
“The footage, filmed by investigators from the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA) and the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), shows a Norwegian whaling ship firing a grenade-tipped harpoon into a minke whale. Despite the hunt taking place in perfect conditions, the whale takes some two-and-a-half minutes to die.”
So, this contradicts pro whaling countries like Japan and Norway and exposes the lies they use to justify their desires to kill whales.
Article:
New footage fuels argument of anti-whaling lobby
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO0606/S00119.htm
Tuesday, 13 June 2006, 12:28 pm
Press Release: World Society for Animals
New footage fuels welfare argument of anti-whaling lobby
As pro and anti-whalers meet in St Kitts to debate whale killing methods, new undercover footage is released which proves that there is no humane way to kill a whale at sea - even in optimum weather conditions.
The footage, filmed by investigators from the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA) and the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), shows a Norwegian whaling ship firing a grenade-tipped harpoon into a minke whale. Despite the hunt taking place in perfect conditions, the whale takes some two-and-a-half minutes to die.
The whaling vessel, 'Brandsholmben' was filmed by investigators just off the coast of Hamningberg, Norway, last month, as it pursued the whale for 25 minutes before firing at it. Accompanying the hunted whale was another whale, which made a narrow escape. This is unusual for minke whales as they are usually solitary animals except during breeding or when with a calf. It is not known what the relationship between these two whales was.
This timely release coincides with a technical workshop on whale killing methods and associated welfare issues which takes place before the opening of the 2006 meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in St Kitts.
Commenting on the footage, Leah Garcs, WSPA's Director of Campaigns, said: "Despite this hunt taking place in optimum weather conditions, the kill is not instantaneous. This would not be an acceptable 'time to death' for a farm animal, so why should it be permitted for whale? Clearly, on cruelty grounds alone, all commercial and scientific whaling should cease."
EIA spokesperson Jennifer Lonsdale, added: "This investigation once again exposes the cruelty of modern day whaling, where an animal suffers being hunted and killed by an inaccurate shot from a moving vessel. A number of uncontrollable factors such as visibility, sea conditions, speed, and gunner accuracy prevent a guaranteed lethal shot. There is simply no humane way to kill a whale at sea."
This year there is a real fear that pro-whaling nations have gathered enough support within the IWC to overturn some vital and long standing conservation and welfare measures. WSPA and EIA are members of Whalewatch, a coalition of over 140 non-governmental organisations, that campaigns to stop the unnecessary and inhumane practice of commercial and 'scientific' whaling.
Whalers will kill approximately 2,000 whales this year, taking the total death toll to over 25,000 since the ban on commercial whaling came into force in 1986.
Teen Girls Who Filmed Themselves on MySpace.Com Kicking Cat Wrapped in Plastic Around a Room Face Weak Misdemeanor Charge
How weak of a charge for two sick girls who are showing signs of future abuse towards even humans. As the article says, their crime is only related to a misdemeanor charge, and that is IF they were adults.
It’s well documented that those who abuse animals will very soon move on to human victims.
Here are a few articles on the connection between animal abuse, mental problems and future abuse of humans.
http://www.pet-abuse.com/pages/abuse_connection.php
http://pbskids.org/itsmylife/family/pets/article10.html
http://www2.webmagic.com/abuse.com/index7.html
Here’s an article on kids and animal abuse:
http://geari.blogspot.com/2006/01/animal-
abuse-can-be-sign-childrens.html
Article:
Teenagers face sentencing for kicking wrapped cat
http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/
20060614/NEWS01/606140360/1006/NEWS01
Two teenage girls charged with cruelty to an animal face sentencing Aug. 1 in Marion Superior Court after a fact-finding hearing Tuesday.
The Marion County girls, both 14, were charged after an animal-rights group told authorities the girls had posted on the popular Web site MySpace.com a video of themselves kicking a cat wrapped in plastic.
Authorities were alerted by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. The almost two-minute video showed the girls dropping, shoving and kicking the plastic-wrapped cat, named Stump, around a room, making comments such as "How does it feel?"
The 19-pound cat was removed from its home, but a judicial officer later ordered its return.
Authorities have withheld the girls' names because the animal cruelty charge they face would be a misdemeanor if it had involved an adult.
It’s well documented that those who abuse animals will very soon move on to human victims.
Here are a few articles on the connection between animal abuse, mental problems and future abuse of humans.
http://www.pet-abuse.com/pages/abuse_connection.php
http://pbskids.org/itsmylife/family/pets/article10.html
http://www2.webmagic.com/abuse.com/index7.html
Here’s an article on kids and animal abuse:
http://geari.blogspot.com/2006/01/animal-
abuse-can-be-sign-childrens.html
Article:
Teenagers face sentencing for kicking wrapped cat
http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/
20060614/NEWS01/606140360/1006/NEWS01
Two teenage girls charged with cruelty to an animal face sentencing Aug. 1 in Marion Superior Court after a fact-finding hearing Tuesday.
The Marion County girls, both 14, were charged after an animal-rights group told authorities the girls had posted on the popular Web site MySpace.com a video of themselves kicking a cat wrapped in plastic.
Authorities were alerted by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. The almost two-minute video showed the girls dropping, shoving and kicking the plastic-wrapped cat, named Stump, around a room, making comments such as "How does it feel?"
The 19-pound cat was removed from its home, but a judicial officer later ordered its return.
Authorities have withheld the girls' names because the animal cruelty charge they face would be a misdemeanor if it had involved an adult.
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
Due to Japan’s Sneaky Tactics, Pro-Whaling Nations May Hold the Majority of Votes at the Next International Whaling Commission Meeting
Not good at all. Looks like whaling will now begin in full action again. The link below will take you to a page that offers video of a whale being murdered.
Article:
Japan rallying pro-whaling nations
http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/425825/748892
Jun 13, 2006
New Zealand Conservation Minister Chris Carter says it appears pro-whaling nations may hold the majority of votes at the next International Whaling Commission meeting.
Carter says the meeting, which starts on Friday, will be crucial to the future of the world's whale population.
He says delegations from "conservation-minded" countries such as New Zealand will do their utmost to keep whale conservation at the forefront of the IWC's work.
But Carter says Japan has been actively recruiting countries which will support whaling to join the commission and at this stage, appears to have the votes on its side.
The meeting comes as animal rights organisation WSPA says new undercover footage has been released, which proves there is not a humane way to kill a whale.
WSPA says the footage shows a minke whale being shot with a grenade-tipped harpoon and despite the hunt taking place in optimum weather conditions the whale takes two and a half minutes to die.
Article:
Japan rallying pro-whaling nations
http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/425825/748892
Jun 13, 2006
New Zealand Conservation Minister Chris Carter says it appears pro-whaling nations may hold the majority of votes at the next International Whaling Commission meeting.
Carter says the meeting, which starts on Friday, will be crucial to the future of the world's whale population.
He says delegations from "conservation-minded" countries such as New Zealand will do their utmost to keep whale conservation at the forefront of the IWC's work.
But Carter says Japan has been actively recruiting countries which will support whaling to join the commission and at this stage, appears to have the votes on its side.
The meeting comes as animal rights organisation WSPA says new undercover footage has been released, which proves there is not a humane way to kill a whale.
WSPA says the footage shows a minke whale being shot with a grenade-tipped harpoon and despite the hunt taking place in optimum weather conditions the whale takes two and a half minutes to die.
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