I really wanted to do a bunch of individual updates but, when I get behind from traveling as I did last week, the potential posts add up, especially since I also cross-post at Zaadz, CrueltyFree.com, and MySpace, all of which have their own individual time-consuming idiosyncrasies (I've given up on VeganMySpace and VegSpace for now, as they are even harder to work with, and I barely have time as it is). So, I'll post another digest and endeavor to get back into a more regular routine again. Thanks for your patience!

The Associated Press (by way of Forbes) neglects to tell readers that the EU's newly-banned cat and dog fur is morally indistinguishable from fur torn from the backs of other animals in EU Douses Cat and Dog Fur Trade.

Also from AP, this time by way of The Boston Globe, an Alaska man pleads guilty to illegally selling seal parts. The man, who once agreed to help "conserve" the "depleted" northern fur seals, if you can believe that, faces up to one year in prison and a $20,000 fine for illegally selling "more than 100 seal penises to a Korean gift shop in Anchorage, where they were to be resold for about $100 apiece in the traditional Chinese medicine trade."

Bernard Matthews, the British poultry processor that last year claimed it was committed to the "highest standards" of animal welfare, is back in the news for animal cruelty at one of its plants (Daily Mail: Bernard Matthews worker caught playing football with turkeys), further demonstrating that animals' welfare will never be assured so long as they are commodified. The story includes the damning photos and video.

From MSNBC.com: Japan kicks off whaling season along coast (WARNING: Disturbing photo of a dead whale being flensed at the top of the page). Japanese whalers, who at this year's International Whaling Commission conference found themselves under pressure for their continued whaling under the guise of science, make clear the attitude toward whales, saying that they should be managed like any other natural resource, rejecting anti-whaling arguments that the animals should be protected. This anthropocentric view of animals as natural resources must be countered prominently with the fact that these are sentient individuals suffering at the hands of the whalers, not "resources." If we are to live by our own humanitarian ethics, all sentient beings ought to be protected from such so-called harvesting.

A more positive article I dug up, from DentalPlans.com of all places, is called Taking Animals Out Of Laboratory Research. It originally appeared in Science Daily, which itself adapted a press release from the University of Nottingham, but it still bears reporting. While the piece does suggest that the immediate abolition of animal testing is not possible overnight--a self-perpetuating perspective I find particularly frustrating--it does bring with that message the good news that FRAME (Fund for the Replacement of Animals in Medical Experiments) will be officially opening its new Alternatives Laboratory on July 6th:

Pioneering work to reduce the use of animals in scientific research — and ultimately remove them from laboratories altogether — has received a major boost at The University of Nottingham.

A laboratory devoted to finding effective alternatives to animal testing has been expanded and completely remodelled in a £240,000 overhaul designed to hasten the development of effective non-animal techniques.

Scientists hope that by developing the use of cell and tissue cultures, computer modelling, cell and molecular biology, epidemiology and other methods, they will one day be able to completely remove animals from medical research — while still maintaining crucial work to defeat diseases that affect millions of people.

While I'm encouraged to see efforts to end animal research, that day can't come soon enough for the nonhuman animals who shouldn't be kept in cages and experimented on for our own specious purposes in the first place.

Labels: animal experimentation, animal testing, companion animals, fur, pets, poultry, turkeys, whales, whaling, wildlife, wildlife trade

USDA News Release

The same low-pathogenic H5N2 strain of avian influenza that caused an outbreak in Virginia in 2002 has been found in Pendleton County, W. Virginia, leading to the untimely culling of 25,000 turkeys (or "depopulation" in the world of USDA doublespeak).

The operation responsible for the conditions that make this disease so dangerous is actually being reimbursed by the USDA for the financial loss. The USDA will also support the "poultry producer" with the "depopulation" process, which I suppose refers to providing personnel, equipment, and corpse disposal. I can hear the taxpayer dollars being drained from government coffers now.

That's my money, too, and I haven't eaten bird flesh in about 20 years. Not fair, right? These costs should instead be passed on to the consumers of turkeys, so they can start getting a better sense of the true cost of their destructive eating habits. We have to stop using taxpayer money to subsidize these intensively-confined conditions that are ideal for mutating H5N2 into the highly lethal H5N1 strain that has spread through Asia, Europe, and Africa before we end up with a true epidemic on our hands. Otherwise, we are simply paying through the nose for our own potential demise.

One way to help avoid this fate is to stop eating birds and their eggs altogether, if you haven't already, and to make sure everyone you know realizes how their dietary habits threaten us all. Here's a video you can link them to. Frankly, as is common with HSUS advocacy, the production is terribly soft on the consumption of animals, suggesting as it does that free range is a better option than standard factory-farmed animals, but its message could open the door for you to have a discussion with your friends and family on the problems inherent in all animal breeding, confinement, and slaughter.

Labels: avian flu, factory farming, poultry, turkeys

Charlotte Observer: Hatchery routine criticized

Just in time for "Turkey Day"...

The way animals are commoditized for food, producers are forced to insert living beings into industrialized systems, and the results are inherently cruel, as Compassion Over Killing's latest investigation video proves once again:

[An] employee, who worked at the hatchery for three weeks in June and July, documented newly hatched turkeys suffocating in plastic bags, being mangled by machinery and being dumped into the same disposal system used for their discarded eggshells, said the group's executive director, Erica Meier. "From the very first day of their lives, these chicks endured unimaginably abusive treatment," she said.

Of course, a representative for Sleepy Creek Farms, which oversees the hatcheries of Goldsboro Milling, trotted out the usual party lines, saying that the number of baby turkeys ("poults") who die by the methods documented above is minimal.

Factory "farmers" always go back to the commoditization argument, saying that it's in their best interests not to waste any animals, but there is waste built into the operation (acceptable losses), despite Nick Weaver's claim that "I like to get every single poult that's viable out of these hatcheries and to a farm." He protests COK's evidence by saying "Everything they're claiming injures my bottom line." (is that AETA code wording...?)

Notice Weaver's use of the word "viable." He's actually not denying COK's claims. He's stating a fact, and confirming that each of these lives is only valuable to him as a commodity.

Each poult is worth roughly $1.10, Weaver said. He estimated that of the roughly 75,000 poults processed each day at the company's hatcheries, about 20 accidentally die or are destroyed because they are not viable.

Occasionally, some poults are destroyed because they are considered surplus, and suffocation is one method accepted under industry guidelines, he said.

Another industry-accepted killing method is to send them through the same pneumatic tubes used to dispose of their eggshells, where they are instantaneously killed by a high-speed impact, he said. The guidelines were developed in compliance with both state and federal regulations, he added.

"To portray it as this horrible, sinister ... situation is just not fair, just not accurate," Weaver said.

How can it not be fair or accurate to portray the rough handling and suffocation of animals as horrible and sinister? Just because it's allowed doesn't make it acceptable to humane, civilized people. The notion of animals being "viable" or "surplus" is inherently sinister, as well. These are not inanimate objects we're talking about here.

The solution to this cruelty? Stop looking at animals as widgets, and start looking at them as what they are: living, feeling beings, individuals with an inherent right not to be treated as a thing.

Please send this entry, or at least a link to the article (better yet, sit them down in front of COK's heartbreaking video) to turn your friends and family off of turkey this Thursday and every day. Together, we can make Thanksgiving a more animal-friendly holiday.

Special thanks to COK and Erica Meier for their investigative work, which continues to reveal the inhumanity of industrialized animal "agriculture."

Labels: Butterball, Compassion Over Killing, Thanksgiving, turkeys

CBS News: You Choose, Steve Hartman Reports

Perhaps a bit of positive news from CBS Evening News with Katie Couric:

Viewers have chosen for Steve Hartman to report on saving wild turkeys from dinner plates over ukuleles being sent to our troops and $50,000 diamonds laying on the ground at a state park. I have to say, focusing on saving lives over ukuleles and diamonds strikes me as a good call.

By the way, if you want to send our troops something they want, socks seem to be a very popular request.

Here's hoping the story on turkeys this Friday isn't so tongue-in-cheek as to denigrate the turkeys. You have to assume the producers are all planning on having their own turkey for Thanksgiving. And because they are talking about saving wild turkeys, we'll also have to assume there will be no mention of the plight of turkeys factory-farmed for mass production. Or course, Assignment America is presented by ExxonMobil, so one ought not to expect anything terribly progressive in the first place.

Labels: Thanksgiving, turkeys

MercuryNews.com

This is the kind of story that shocks you by not being reported more widely. I did notice it over the weekend, but didn't read the piece until it was e-mailed to me by frequent tipper Joellen Secondo of Massachusetts. I'm sure glad she prompted me to read the article.

Let me start with a brief bit of background. It is very disturbing to me that this could happen after incidents led Northwest in 2001 to declare it would no longer carry chicks:

...in early September, Northwest Airlines kicked the chicks out from under its wings, arguing that too many of them failed to survive the voyage and that the fees were too low to cover the special care chicks require. Technically, Northwest said it no longer would accept baby chickens as mail, only as cargo, for which it charges three times as much.

Northwest actually fought for humane treatment of the chicks, requesting the right to refuse any animal shipment "that in the sole opinion of the carrier cannot be transported in a safe and humane manner," but the U.S. Postal Service and poultry industry balked at Northwest's attempt at doing the right thing, and Congress voted to force Northwest to carry the chicks at mail rates instead of cargo rates.

Flash forward to July 2006, as record-breaking temperatures are killing people and animals alike, and Northwest is now part of a chain of events resulting in the death of thousands of turkey chicks:

In one case, according to the [Peninsula Humane Society], more than 9,000 of the birds were crammed onto a Northwest Airlines flight, on which they died from suffocation, overheating and dehydration.

The society intends to press for animal cruelty charges against Northwest, said shelter spokesman Scott Delucchi.

Poultry get about zero protection from the government, so I don't see this suit being very fruitful on that end, but I do hope that the story generates publicity, in order that turkey eaters might know what their dietary habits are supporting and perhaps think about eating something else for a change, especially if they make it all the way through to the end of the story, where the story gets even more detailed in its description of the failures leading to thousands of deaths of innocent baby chicks this month, including another couple of incidents involving Northwest, like this one:

[Hybrid Turkeys, a commercial breeder in Canada] shipped 9,360 chicks to San Francisco, this time via three Air Canada flights. When one of the planes malfunctioned and made a pit stop in Las Vegas, the chicks were unloaded in 108-degree heat. The humane society says they sweltered for hours before being loaded onto an America West flight to San Francisco.

[snip]

Though most of the Air Canada shipments made it to Fresno, 2,240 dying or dead chicks were left at the San Francisco airport. Delucchi said Northwest, which handles Air Canada's baggage, tossed nearly all of them in the trash compactor.

While you, me, and most feeling people are rightly disturbed by something like this, tossing live animals into the trash is a common practice in animal agriculture.

This all comes back to the need to protect animals from being treated as purely commodities, but rather as sentient beings that deserve some basic rights that will ensure they are not discarded like yesterday's news. Even if animal agriculture must continue for the time being, it has to accept the responsibility for caring for all of its charges as if they were somebody's baby... because they are.

Labels: poultry, transport, turkeys