Author: Sandra Kyle

‘Seeing Ourselves In Others’

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle

Concert pianist, University Professor, accomplished TEDx speaker:  Dr Joanne Kong has also attracted a following as a powerful advocate for other animals.   She writes:-

“The coronavirus is just one symptom that human influence has reached its point of greatest harm, not only to ourselves, but to our fellow creatures and the planet. Having an honest reckoning about the perils of animal exploitation will give humankind the opportunity to elevate and transform its collective identity towards a conscious awareness that all living beings are connected. It’s about seeing ourselves in others, and widening our sphere of love, sensitivity and kindness in order to lessen suffering”. 

Read the full Plant Based World article here

WANTED BY THE FBI: TWO PIGLETS

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle

KEY POINTS

  • Three years ago the FBI search warrant and raid in search of two dying piglets rescued from a factory farm illustrates the lengths the government will employ to protect the animal agriculture industry.

  • Non violent animal rights activists are often designated as “terrorists” and are treated in the court system as such, even when no human beings are hurt and the economic loss is minimal.

  • The factory farm industry and its armies of lobbyists wield great influence in the halls of federal and state power, while animal rights activists wield virtually none.

  • The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is typically dominated by executives from the very factory farm industries that are most in need of regulation.  The politics of the U.S.  means there are massive forces arrayed behind factory farms, and very few in support of animal welfare.

  • Undercover investigations at the Westland/Hallmark Meat Company in California filmed workers forcing sick cows, many unable to walk, into the “kill box” by repeatedly shocking them with electric prods, jabbing them in the eye, prodding them with a forklift, and spraying water up their noses.

  • At a Vermont slaughterhouse operated by Bushway Packing,  days-old calves were filmed being kicked, dragged, and skinned alive.

  • An  undercover investigator at E6 Cattle Company in Texas filmed workers beating cows on the head with hammers and pickaxes and leaving them to die.

  • Sparboe Farms in Iowa was exposed when undercover investigators documented hens with gaping, untreated wounds laying eggs in cramped conditions among decaying corpses.

  • Claims by the animal industries of ‘distorting the evidence’ are even more untenable now that activists are using virtual reality technology.

  • But the animal rights movement, despite receiving relatively scant media attention and operating under the threat of federal prosecutions for terrorism, boasts some of the nation’s more effective, shrewd, and tenacious political activists who have forced into the public consciousness the knowledge of how this industry imposes suffering, abuse, and torture on living beings on a mass and systematic scale, all to maximize profits.

  • There are serious health risks posed by the fecal waste produced in factory farms, and the excessive, reckless use of antibiotics breeds treatment-resistant, potentially deadly, bacterial strains.  Industrial farming also exacerbates climate problems.

  • There is a temptation to turn away from and ignore this mass suffering and cruelty because it’s so painful to confront.  We should all feel gratitude to animal activists for their increasing success in making us see what we are enabling when we consume the products of this barbaric and sociopathic industry.

 

Read the full Intercept Article Here

SIX REASONS YOU SHOULD GIVE UP DAIRY

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle

End Animal Slaughter contributor Lynley Tulloch advocates for bobby calves through her group Starfish Bobby Calf Project.     In this blog she outlines six reasons why we should give up eating dairy products. 

 

This is a photo of a bobby calf taken just the other day in New Zealand by animal rights activist Sandra Kyle. It is an animal cruelty issue for the following six reasons:-

 

ONE

This calf will die traumatized. He is legally allowed to be transported for up to 8 hours, before being killed. He will find it difficult to balance on the truck floor, which is hard and caked in calf urine and feces. He may slip and fall over. He may drown in the urine as it puddles on the truck floor – I have heard first hand accounts of this from bobby calf truck drivers.

 

TWO

This calf will die hungry. He can legally go for 24 hours without being fed milk before being killed. He is a neonate – a mammal with a strong desire to suckle. Normally he would suckle from his mother at least 8 times in 24 hours. This natural instinct to suckle is frustrated when he needs it most.

 

THREE

This calf will die alone and frightened. He will die without his mother. He is programmed to stick closely to his mother’s side for safety and food. She is his lifeline. Without her, he will be stressed and anxious.

 

FOUR

This calf will die unloved. He will be regarded in his final hours as nothing more than a waste product that needs to be disposed of. He will not be seen as a unique individual who has a personality. Instead he will join the tens of thousands of bobby calves who end their lives on concrete killing floors every week in New Zealand. Around 2 million bobby calves a year are murdered.

 

FIVE

This calf will die for nothing. He will be mutilated in a disrespectful way when dead. He will be skinned, dismembered, and rendered into a product for human use. Those long eyelashes, the soft coat, the delicate body will become a gruesome pile of bits.

 

SIX

This calf will die because no one cared. He will die because people choose to produce and consume products made from the milk of his mother.   You have the choice. He doesn’t.

This calf has already been killed. He was likely a male calf, and he was killed between 4-10 days of age. He was a jersey, a common breed used for the high production of milk. His mother will be in the milking shed, and the milk her body produces for her calf is being siphoned for human consumption and profit.

Choose compassion and not cruelty.  Ditch Dairy Now.

 

Dr Lynley Tulloch is an animal advocate, and Lecturer in Education.

Bullfighters Want Handouts In Covid Environment! Sign Petition.

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle | 4 Comments on Bullfighters Want Handouts In Covid Environment! Sign Petition.

A tortured bull collapses, and lies bleeding while spectators cheer, and one of his feet is hacked off as a keepsake.    The barbaric ‘sport’ of bullfighting is asking the Spanish government for money to keep going in the Covid environment.  Take action!

 

Read the article and sign the petition here

 

Fish Are Way Smarter Than We Think

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle

Seventy percent of the planet is covered with water.  Trillions of fish live within our oceans, and many of them display rich and complex behaviours.   Fish are smart.

They are also sentient, according to the broad consensus from the scientific community. ‘Sentient’ means they feel physical and emotional pain.

Given the trillions of intelligent, sentient beings we torture and slaughter annually for human consumption, and the likelihood that overfishing will wipe out ocean life before the end of the century, it is high time that governments display enough courage to put an end to the carnage.  

Listen to the Radio New Zealand interview with Australian fish expert Professor Calum Brown here

 

 

Fishing Is Torture For Sentient Beings

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle

This week three teenage boys reeled in a 700lb Tuna, who they tortured for 7 hours. We can only imagine the pain the fish went through as it bravely fought for its life.

Fish are not vegetables.  They feel pain and distress in analogous ways to other animals.

Fishing is one of the cruellest pastimes there is, and it is unfathomable that we teach it to our children.

All methods of fishing are cruel to fishes, and overfishing harms many other creatures in the marine environment. 

It is time to give up eating fish.  

 

Try the vegan challenge at challenge22.com

 

Read about the tuna catch here

 

Find out more about fishing here

 

 

 

 

 

Future viral outbreaks are inevitable – it’s time to adopt a plant-based diet

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

“The COVID-19 virus has had a huge impact on all of our lives and changed the way we live – perhaps forever. But while it’s important to acknowledge the massive loss of lives and jobs and the impact of the virus on our global society and economy, it’s also vital to examine the root causes of the pandemic – and pandemics in general – if we are to minimise the risk of potentially far more damaging outbreaks in the future.
By exploring the crucial connection between the current crisis and our animal-based food system, the ProVeg Food & Pandemics Report highlights how our food choices help to create a recipe for zoonotic pandemics. By shifting to plant-based and cultured foods, we can help to minimise the risk of future pandemics as well as helping to resolve many of the other key challenges we face, including climate change, biodiversity loss, world hunger, antimicrobial resistance, and the rise of other food-related diseases.
The global response to COVID-19 has shown that we can respond urgently and collectively and that we can do so now. Together, we can change our food systems for a better, healthier, and more resilient world”.

https://proveg.com/food-and-pandemics-report/?fbclid=IwAR05t3eTgOxDISDlKlb4ZvkPh8L871CBS1A8-0h0bXaOv4V9t4ts7QL6dzM

Viscous soup should be Vicious soup. The horror of shark finning.

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle

Key Points

 

– Hong Kong is the largest shark fin importer in the world, and responsible for about half of the global trade.

 

– The fins are often cut from sharks while they are still alive, and they are then thrown back into the ocean to die an agonising death.

 

– In May, customs officials made the biggest shark fin seizure in Hong Kong history: 26 tonnes of fins, contained  in two shipping containers from Ecuador, cut from the bodies of 38,500 endangered sharks.

 

– Shark fin soup is a feature at wedding banquets and other feasts in Hong Kong and other parts of Asia, as because they are expensive and prized as a status symbol.

 

– 100 million sharks are being mutilated and killed every year for this gluggy soup.  The fins themselves don’t have much taste.

 

– When the demand for shark fin soup stops, so will the carnage.

Read the Guardian article here:

 

 

 

In memory of Regan Russell, 1954-2020

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle

The day after Animal Rights activist Regan Russell was knocked down and killed by a slaughterhouse truck driver in Toronto, the Plant Manager at the slaughterhouse here in Whanganui, New Zealand, approached me and said: ‘Please be careful of the trucks.  Make sure you stay clear.’    I don’t have a very friendly relationship with the slaughterhouse staff, but I could see that he was sincere, and looking a bit worried.   It occurred to me that in slaughterhouse/trucking communities, the news of Russell’s death had travelled just as quickly as it had in Animal Rights circles.

It was truly shocking news.  After years of standing peacefully outside Fearman’s Pork with their signs, and offering water to panting, dehydrated pigs about to be killed, activists had lost one of their own. 

Just a few hours after her tragic death, we were reading eye-witness accounts that the driver ‘had an angry look on his face’,  and had deliberately stopped in an awkward place for activists to give the pigs water.   People all over the world who do these vigils know first-hand that some drivers are angry and aggressive, using their giant trucks as weapons.  Our presence incenses them.  We hold a mirror up to their complicity in an inhumane industry and they don’t like what they see.  I have personally been yelled at and abused many times.       Once a driver swerved in close to where I was standing and opened a trap door, splashing animal feces and urine at my feet.  Once when I was photographing some days-old bobby calves, the driver suddenly reversed, then sped forward again so I couldn’t get clear photos.  If someone had been standing behind the truck, who he hadn’t seen, then there could have been a tragic death on that day too.  The recent passing of Bill #156 in Canada that is punitive against demonstrators and whistleblowers, led to some activists speculating that the truck driver may have felt ’emboldened’.   The case is still being investigated, and I hope the whole truth will come out.  

It is just so very sad.  Regan Russell’s commitment to the cause was exceptional.   At 65, she had been fighting the good fight for animal liberation since the 1970s.  All over the world in The Save Movement, and in other Animal Rights groups, there have been vigils and memorials in her honour.   People have written beautiful testimonials about her character, and her selfless dedication to the cause.    The link below is one such touching article, written by an old friend.

– Sandra Kyle, Owner/Editor, End Animal Slaughter

Read the blog here

 

 

ARGUMENTS FOR EATING MEAT DEBUNKED

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle

Millions of people all over the world are cutting back on meat or giving it up altogether.  This is because of compelling evidence that plant-based is the best diet, and that over-consumption of meat and dairy leads to disease, pollution, deforestation, biodiversity loss and global warming. The animal agriculture sector is trying to fight back against the trend to veganism with counter-arguments which Guardian Environment Editor Damian Carrington, debunks here.

 

Read the article 

Malia’s Story

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle | 2 Comments on Malia’s Story

This is a mother, being dragged inside a slaughterhouse to have her throat slit.

Look at her poor, humped body, marked in indelible pen by the farmer who decreed her no longer profitable. She has spent her life in Hell from the moment she was born, but she is still afraid of death, and drags her feet desperately as she tries to resist her fate.
Inside her heart is pounding and the blood is rushing to her head. In mere moments, that blood  will be spilled on a filthy slaughterhouse floor, and splashed upon the aprons of those paid to murder her.
She was selectively bred to produce as many piglets as possible, and she has given birth to dozens of babies.   She was first impregnated when she was only eight months old. 
She spent her entire life in cages, lined up with hundreds of other sows in an enormous, barren, foul smelling shed. Bars separated her from her sisters. She could never seek comfort or security from pressing against the flesh of her kind. She could not escape. She could not retreat. She could not turn around.
All day every day this naturally clean girl lay in her own excrement on the hard concrete floor.  Her muscles ached and drew tight, and she developed sores from rubbing against the steel bars. In the pain and intense stress that this confinement caused her, she bit the bars of the steel cage that surrounded her, and her mouth filled with white foam that spat from her mouth when she cried out her distress.
All day every day this naturally clean girl lay in her own excrement on the hard concrete floor.  Her muscles ached and drew tight, and she developed sores from rubbing against the steel bars. In the pain and intense stress that this confinement caused her, she bit the bars of the steel cage that surrounded her, and her mouth filled with white foam that spat from her mouth when she cried out her distress.
After enduring her pregnancy in this prison the size of a household fridge, she was moved to yet another cage – a birthing cage, or ‘farrowing crate’, in preparation for having her babies. Prompted by her natural instincts, she immediately looked around for something to build a nest with – but could find nothing.
She was so stressed and tense that the birth was all the more painful for her. When her piglets arrived, the steel bars prevented her from interacting with them. Her babies latched onto her teets as she lay motionless on her side, sinking ever deeper into despair. She longed to satisfy her natural yearning to care for her babies properly, but she never could, and a normal mother-piglet bond was never formed.
When her babies were just three weeks old, they were forcibly weaned and taken from her. She was then returned to another cage to be made pregnant again, and the painful cycle repeated a number of times until she was ‘spent’ and no longer any use to the farmer. She was then sent to the slaughterhouse.
Which is where you see her now.
This girl never had a name, just a number.
So I will call her Malia, which means ‘Beloved’

 

–    Sandra Kyle

 

Sandra Kyle is the owner of End Animal Slaughter, website, which she started in 2018

with the goal of closing all slaughterhouses in the Western World by 2025.