KHON2.com: New animal cruelty laws
In an interesting case of a legislature responding to a conservative decision from the judiciary with a positive action, Hawaiian lawmakers and Govern Linda Lingle were spurred to approve two new animal-friendly bills by a case in Kahluu, where
animal investigators found dozens of dogs and puppies in conditions so unsanitary their health was at risk.One wonders whether the judge has any companion animals. Fortunately the other branches of Hawaii's government are more animal-friendly.
Adding insult to injury -- the humane society spent more than a quarter of a million dollars to rescue and care for the dogs, only to have a judge allow owner James Montgomery to sell them without reimbursing the humane society one dime.
Senate Judiciary Chair Colleen Hanabusa (D-Waianae) said that aggrevated lawmakers.
"As much as we don't like to tell the judiciary what to do," Hanabusa said, "One of the travesties of that event is the person did not have to pay back the humane society for any of the costs."
So to barking dog voices and smiling human faces, the Governor signed a law requiring pet owners to pay the costs of rescuing and caring for their animals. Another new law makes it easier for investigators to impound mistreated pets.
Planet Ark: Judges Reject Human Rights Appeal on Fox-Hunting
Hunters had attempted to overturn the fox-hunting ban in England, claiming that the ban violated their rights, but Britain's Appeal Court rejected their argument:
"The essence of this appeal is that the ban engages and infringes either directly or indirectly, the appellants' rights under articles 8 and 11 (rights to privacy and freedom of peaceful assembly)."Cheers!
However, the judges said they did not consider either right had been infringed.
Planet Ark: Congo's Elephants Increasing in Park Despite War
According to a census taken in Africa's Virunga National Park, the elephant population has increased from 265 to 340 during the last three years, despite the bloodshed there (Virunga is located between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda). Another number the article shares with us is an increase in buffalo from 2,300 to 3,800 during the same period. Virunga once was home to the highest density of large mammals in the world, we're told. So, while the increases are good, it's important to realize that the numbers are still precarious, and that poaching still claims the lives of animals and park guards, who are only paid $1 per month by the government, though they do receive some outside support. One was killed as recently as May 2006, according to conversation groups.
Planet Ark: China Gives Extra-Picky Pandas Their Space
This one features what appears to be a whole new way to qualify an endangered species category: "unusually endangered". It's kind of sad that we even need to use phrases like that.
The 300 pandas of a rare subspecies who call northwest China's central Shaanxi province home will soon be protected by five new reserves in the fog-shrouded Qinling mountains, the China Daily said.So, we'll have to enjoy the little bit of good news we're hearing this weekend, considering the species extinction going on out in the world with clear-cut forests and othe environmental destruction.
[snip]
The reserves would cover about 80 percent of the pandas' habitat once they are expanded from 181,100 to 500,000 hectares, the paper said.
[snip]
This is not the only good news panda lovers have received this month -- results from a recent study show that there may be 2,500 to 3,000 giant pandas in the wild, almost double previous estimates.
Which brings me to the bad news:
Planet Ark: Investors Welcome Salmon Farm King, Ecologists Worry
Omega-3 proponents keep pushing fish as a healthy addition to people's diets, and bird flu fears are given credit for increasing fish consumption as well. This is, of course, unsustainable in the wild, which is what has fish "farmers" salivating. Problem is fish farming is even less sustainable, and it certainly isn't a very good deal for the fish:
This year, fish farms will produce around 1.3 million tonnes of salmon, up from around 550,000 tonnes 10 years ago, a small amount compared to the world's poultry production but still enough to supply over 8 billion meal portions in a year.There's the rub. 12-15 tons of fish per day to feed salmon so that people can eat the salmon. Eat lower on the food chain to solve this problem, as usual. A plant-based diet is a far more environmentally sensitive way to eat, and the Omega-3 benefits of fish can be had in flax seed oil, canola (rape seed) oil, walnuts, and other sources. We already know you don't need protein from animals.
[snip]
Nestling at the entrance to a deep fjord, it looks like a floating warehouse with a grid of 12 underwater cages -- about half the size of a football field.
Danielsen says modern technology contains any potential damage to the environment and that the farm does not use chemicals. She can watch her 650,000 fish on closed-circuit cameras, look for excessive sea lice or strange behavior which might be evidence of disease or tears in the nets.
Sound sensors warn if any of the fish feed pellets escape the cages and divers check for damage to the seabed.
The farm uses 12 to 15 tonnes of fish feed a day for the salmon. The constant drone of the overhead red tubes pumping the feed to the fish forces workers to speak with raised voices.
Houston Chronicle: Scientists Hope to Save Caspian Beluga
In other water animal news, it should come as no big surprise to my readers that exploitation of the species for food is driving the population of the endangered beluga sturgeon to the brink of extinction, along with Western oil consumption:
A worldwide study released by the Pew Institute last year said most major sturgeon fisheries are catching 85 percent less fish than at their peak in the late 1970s. It called for a total ban on fishing for most endangered species and reducing fishing pressure on others.While the average Joe thinks of vegans as avoiding only meat, eggs, and dairy (when they know that much), most probably are oblivious to the plight of beluga sturgeon and -- much like the current successes with foie gras and past successes like whaling -- would be fairly supportive of efforts to entirely ban fishing of the endangered species if they knew about it. Not like the average person can afford the stuff anyway. So, fire off a letter to the editor, keeping in mind their policy:
Beluga, whose roe is reputedly the world's most expensive delicacy, is the most threatened species of sturgeon. And the population in the Caspian -- which provides 90 percent of beluga caviar -- "got hammered very fast," said Phaedra Doukakis, a Pew Institute research scientist.
"The peak and decline was very rapid," she said.
There is no reliable estimate of how many Caspian beluga remain.
According to the Pew Institute, they numbered around 375,000 in 2001, with just 55,000 of them adults.
250 words or less, as part of e-mail text, including name, address, and day and evening phone numbers for verification purposes only. Letters subject to editing.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a good piece in their Lifestyle section on pet custody battles, where courts treat animals as property. Though the article's author seems to work hard to maintain a reporter's unbiased gaze on the subject, she seems to come down in favor of animals being more than property. Of course, she doesn't come right out and say it, nor are there any particular indicators, but if you read the whole thing, you may also come away encouraged that American society is trending toward a more familial definition of companion animals, and perhaps our archaic laws will catch up sooner rather than later.
Many of us have pets in our families, so this presents an excellent opportunity to weigh in with your thoughts on the matter.
A surprisingly involved, and rather long article in Phoenix's The Catholic Sun left my jaw on the floor a couple of times. Focused on activist efforts to get the Arizonans for Humane Farms initiative onto the ballot to outlaw intensive confinement of pregnant pigs and veal calves on factory farms in the state, we hear from the other side, and I have to wonder that people are so distance from their food that they can accept some of these statements without question. "...pigs are a commodity," said Jim Klinker, executive secretary and chief administrative officer for the Arizona Farm Bureau, one of the organizations opposing the initiative. The pigs “cannot turn around" he admits, but argues up and down that the modern facilities are clean, pigs are well cared-for, and waste is properly treated. In fact, the gestation crates (as they always say) allegedly keep the hogs safe from one another, seeing as how hogs are, as Klinker says, aggressive animals. I'm sure they are, when you keep them under intensively confined conditions. With pigs being smarter than the average dog, it's no surprise they'd become aggressive. Dogs would, too, for that matter.
Remembering for a moment that this is being published in a Catholic paper, I wanted to also sum up with a quote the conclusion of the article:
...abusing the Earth and animals speaks to the prerogative of many persons that are “primarily interested in economics and less interested in the moral person, which is of course inconsistent with the Catholic worldview.While I'm not Catholic, I can most certainly agree with this position. Giving up one's ethics in search of economics is a recipe for disaster.
I'd really like to get into these next three quite a bit, but they are all rather lengthy, stimulated as they are by the Whole Foods decision to eliminate live lobster sales after months of research determined there was no humane way to get live lobsters to humans through their supply chain at this time. Two are from The New York Times, which I believe you'll have to sign up for online for free (they pulled up for me, but I think I'm set to automatically log in, so I don't even notice it). The piece from Boston Magazine seems to be free to all readers for now.
The New York Times | Your Money: How a Lobster Leaves the Building
The first piece is rather sick, as an allegedly "ethical eater" searched for a way to more quickly kill a lobster or crab than boiling them alive and -- after much failed and likely painful experimentation -- came up with the CrustaStun. If this is the future of animal welfare, humans are deluding themselves even further about their duty to animals.
The creator of this contraption is duly horrified when encountering a live lobster. Programmed from childhood to distance himself from the act of killing involved in creating his food, he'd rather make the killing easier, more sanitary, more distant than change the paradigm that causes him to see animals as food in the first place. When people ask me if veganism is hard, I want to tell them it's easy, but they mean practically speaking, and I'm always thinking of the ethical and emotional ramifications. Going vegan was like lifting a huge weight from my shoulders. Sure is a lot easier than building a death machine.
Nowhere in the following story does it suggest that a plant-based diet is a legitimate alternative to suffering. Quite the contrary. The second page seems to lend credence to the notion that eating meat is basically essential, but it doesn't exactly make a good case for lobster. The story is so wrong-headed, in so many ways, and I just can't do justice to it right now, so please take a look at it, and contact the editor to voice your opinion, reminding readers that there are far fewer contradictions in going vegan than worrying about humane an animals' life was before it was killed for something as inessential as the taste of meat.
The New York Times | Week in Review | Critic's Notebook: It Died for Us
You can respectfully register your disgust with both of these pieces, at the same time providing an animal-friendly view, by e-mailing your letter to the editor, including the usual contact information, and bearing in mind that brevity is the soul of wit.
The Boston Magazine piece appears in the Dining, Food & Wine section, which tells you right away how this is going to go. It references the CrustaStun, but recognizes its limitations, and lavishes much attention on a massive, macabre device that has the ability to almost instantaneously kill 200 pounds of live lobster at a time, even making the vacuum-packed processing more efficient in the process. Just what the industry likes: More efficient killing. Especially if it's more "humane," so that foodies won't let their conscience interfere with their purchasing decisions.
In a way, the writer is a proxy for all those foodies as he condemns the boiling alive as "useless torture," but the deaths themselves are useless, and that's what people often fail to accept. You hear or read justifications of giving animals a good life, and that they are killed quickly and humanely, so what harm is there, but the harm is to us.
As Thomas Edison put it: "Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages."
And, perhaps more to my point is this quote from Albert Einstein: “It is my view that the vegetarian manner of living, by its purely physical effect on the human temperament, would most beneficially influence the lot of mankind.”
There is a spiritual release that comes from removing one's self from systems that commodify animals and kill them not because they are essential for our survival, but because "it tastes good." People need to be liberated from their meat addiction; it enslaves their minds and cheapens their views toward all life.
No tags today, I'm afraid. I need to get some sleep. Look at the timestamp above and you'll see why I'm calling this one done.
