United States Presidential Contender Cory Booker has a plan to ditch factory farms.
If implemented, this would be a leap forward towards the end of all animal agriculture.
Read the Live Kindly article here.
Author: Sandra Kyle
If Only They Could Cry Out…. Farmed Fish So Depressed They’re Giving Up On Life
“Fish in aquaculture farms are forced to live in crowded tanks and endure unwanted interactions with other fish, handling by humans, struggles to get food, and sudden changes in lighting, water depth and currents. Just like pigs and chickens, fish in intensive farms live a life of suffering”.
It is time we realised that fish are like every other sentient being, and suffer greatly because of our selfish choices. The only moral thing to do is to stop all fishing and fish farming. There are cruelty-free fish-free products that have a similar taste and texture to fish.
Pledge to go Vegan in January
Read the Animals Australia article here
Ducks Out of Water: The Cruel Reality of Duck Factory Farming
Farmed ducks, like other poultry raised for food, suffer greatly. As with all intensively farmed animals, ducks in factory farms are deprived of their most basic needs.
They would like to be able to fly, forage, choose a mate and live for 15 years or more, but the life they are forced to endure couldn’t be more different. They live inside dark, filthy sheds with up to 10,000 other birds, and never feel the warmth of the sun or enjoy swimming. Except for drinking, animals that have evolved to eat, swim, dive, clean and play in rivers, lakes and ponds, have no access to water at all. Without water they cannot preen, their feathers deteriorate, and they can lose body heat. They need water to cleanse their eyes, and many develop eye itchiness and other eye diseases, and some even become blind.
Blind duck in a UK duck farm. Source: VIVA
Mother Ducks cannot even sit on their own eggs, as the moment they are laid they are taken from under them and placed in incubation chambers. Because they are bred to produce as much meat as possible in the shortest time, the ducklings grow quickly, and reach slaughter weight at around just 7 weeks old. Even before then some become lame with painful leg deformities their weight gain causes, and standing all day on litter-strewn floors can lead to painful ammonia burns on their skin. Many fall onto their backs and are not able to right themselves, there is no one to right them, no one cares, there is virtually no one to care: in one UK based company, the most intensive enterprise of its kind there are as many as 85,000 birds tended by only one person. Consequently these poor creatures die a frightening and protracted death as they struggle in vain to right themselves.
Ducks in despair. Source upc-online
In the wild ducks are swimming most of the time, eating plankton, seeds, plants, insects and worms, instead of the dry pellets they are fed in the sheds. On top of all this suffering, they are also neglected and sometimes deliberately abused by sadistic workers. In 2014 and 2016 employees at two US farms, Reichardt Duck Farm and Culver Dark Farms, were videotaped tormenting ducks to death by bashing them against walls, and ripping off their heads. They were videoed callously throwing, dropping and roughly handling ducks and ducklings by their heads and wings. The undercover cameras also showed animals with ripped-off body parts stuck in wire mesh flooring, and birds were seen trapped in manure pits below the floor.
The extract below is from a recent Viva campaign.
“Modern farming techniques have turned the fluffy Easter duckling image into a sick joke. 19 million ducks were slaughtered in the UK in 2005 (in the mid 1970’s the UK duck population was barely a million). We know what these birds lives are really like because we have investigated several duck units. Twice we visited Manor Farm Ducklings, who then supplied Marks & Spencer. On our first visit, we saw thousands of fluffy, yellow ducklings in stinking, windowless sheds. Some could barely walk and dragged themselves across on their wings. Others had fallen on their backs and were unable to right themselves and this is how they would die – a horrible, stressful death. Many had already lost the battle to live and their little corpses were scattered amongst the straw. One duckling had fallen behind machinery and was hopelessly trapped – calling desperately for a mother who would never come.”
Duck is a traditional French food, and is especially popular in Chinese cuisine where it is considered a rich delicacy, and most commercial dark farms supply restaurants directly. When we eat duck, and the flesh of other factory farmed animals, we are causing them continuous suffering. There is only one way to prevent cruelty to sentient creatures raised for food, and that is to make the commitment to go Vegan.
Take the pledge to go Vegan for the month of January, 2020.
End Animal Slaughter’s Sandra Kyle does solitary slaughterhouse vigils as part of the worldwide Save movement. In her latest blog she reflects on changes that have taken place in the last seventy years, and predicts a world without slaughterhouses as an imminent reality.
SLAUGHTERHOUSE VIGIL Land Meats, Whanganui 15 December 2019
Today standing at the entrance to Land Meats in Whanganui I found myself thinking of Mrs Gallagher. Mrs Gallagher and the Gallagher family lived a few doors down from us when I was growing up in suburban Auckland in the 1940s and 50s. Mrs Gallagher was short and compact, well-groomed and she always walked with her right forearm in front of her chest, her purse dangling from her elbow. She worked part time somewhere in the city, and every day when she got off the bus she would bustle past our house on her bandy legs to go off home to cook the evening meal of meat and three vegs we all ate in those days, and I would marvel at the aura of certainty that emanated from her. Mrs Gallagher would give you a cheery wave when she saw you, unless she didn’t like you of course, when she would ignore you, or scowl at you, or even give you a tongue lashing. Unlike my own mother, who was weighed down with care and anxiety (but who still put a brave face on it) Mrs Gallagher for me represented the widespread feeling at the time that we lived in the best of all possible worlds. ‘Things are as they are for a purpose, and if they are as they are, then they must be right as they are. God is in Heaven and all is well.’
Even as a child I knew that this was bollocks. Things were not at all right as they were. They were a real mess, just as they are now, and the reason for this, I figured out, is because the humans who create our world are full of selfishness, ignorance, greed, superstition and fear.
In a very real sense we live in better times now than in the 1950s. We are more informed and better educated, our minds are not so narrow and parochial. But Albert Einstein said it truly: ‘We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them’ and the only way to step out of the mess we have created is for us to evolve.
Albert Einstein said it truly: ‘We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them’ and the only way to step out of the mess we have created is for us to evolve.
To evolve our consciousness is a very tall order, and what’s the notion even doing in a facebook blog anyway? Well, because we need to get our act together as a matter of urgency – look at the state our planet is in! A lot needs to happen. but we can be pragmatic and concentrate our efforts on a couple of fundamental things. One is for individuals and organisations and governments to practice honest self-reflection, and the other is to demonstrate more compassion and empathy in our day to day lives One of the best ways we can do this is to put ourselves in the place of others, in order to feel as they do. In particular, we should try to feel for the other sentient beings we share the planet with, those very same ones we treat so appallingly badly.
Until we cry for the skinny little sparrows hopping over hot asphalt in search of crumbs; until our heart hurts to see sweaty animals locked inside a death truck on a summer’s day, we have not evolved. But we can certainly get there from here, and something we can do immediately to fast-track our evolution, is to make the decision to go vegan.
Parcels of animal skins at Land Meats Slaughterhouse, Whanganui, NZ.
Take a look at the sea of white mounds I photographed today at the slaughterhouse. Each mound contains the skins of sentient beings who were killed recently at Land Meats. These poor animals were victims of heartless, profit-driven industries, and as animals raised for food, they were denied the same legal protection given to most other animals. Selfishness. Inconsistency. Indifference to suffering and rights. The capitalist machine reduced sentient beings to commodities; meat, bones and skin to be eaten, fed to our pets, used as fertiliser and worn on our backs and feet. The only life they will ever have was stolen from them because we as a species haven’t stopped to reflect what we are doing, and to ask ourselves ‘Is there not a better way?’
It didn’t occur to Mrs Gallagher back in the 1950s, but there IS a better way, and now we have no excuse for ignorance. We have the measure of the manner of the world we live in, and it’s up to us to clean it up.
PS A friend just messaged me to say that she had just eaten an unbelievably delicious vegan trumpet. What Tarnz didn’t know is that I had just eaten not one, but two yummy vegan cornettos! Snap! 
Vegan cuisine has come into its own, so by adopting a vegan diet your taste buds are not losing out on anything at all. Vegan is the future of food, this is the plain Truth. Soon I won’t need to make my lonely stand outside slaughterhouses here in Whanganui, and my other Save Movement friends need not do their vigils either, because all slaughterhouses will be shut down.
Mrs Gallagher would never have believed it – but I certainly hope that you do.
Contemporary Voices for Animals: DXE’s WAYNE HSIUNG
Direction Action Everywhere’s Wayne Hsiung has drawn on his background to shape the grassroots group he founded into one of the most influential animal rights organisations in the world.
The following is an excerpt from Wired Magazine’s recent article about Hsiung and DXE.
Read the full article here.
“Wayne Hsiung grew up in a small town in Indiana, the son of two Taiwanese immigrants who moved to the US so that his father could study chemistry and later take a job as a scientist at Eli Lilly. His parents had spent periods of their own childhoods going hungry in the wake of China’s civil war, and they were delighted to discover that Americans ate meat at practically every meal. But Hsiung, one of only two Asian children in his classes, was deeply lonely, ostracized, mocked and bullied for his race and accent. He begged his parents to get him a dog, a mutt he found in the classified ads, who he says became his best and only friend.
Not long after, when Hsiung was 8, his family took a trip to mainland China to meet relatives for the first time since the split between communist China and Taiwan. But Hsiung’s most vivid memory from that trip remains a dinner his extended family held at a “wildlife” restaurant in Guangzhou, a controversial southern Chinese cuisine that specializes in exotic animals. Hsiung remembers live snakes, raccoons, dogs, and monkeys all captive and available for diners to choose from. Request one, and it would be killed and cooked on the spot.
Hsiung was horrified. He dreamed of the animals’ screams for months, he says. “First, that trip instilled in me from a very young age, incontrovertibly, that some of the things we’re taught by authority figures must be wrong,” Hsiung says. “Secondly, I learned that there was something fundamentally flawed about the way human beings interact with animals.”
When Hsiung was 15, a boy from his school ambushed him, held him down, and slashed his face with a blade. His parents were scared enough by the incident that they allowed him to apply to college early, and he enrolled at DePauw University in Indiana when he was only 16; the next year he transferred to the University of Chicago. College was another turning point in his life. He read Animal Liberation, the seminal animal rights tract written by the philosopher Peter Singer, which laid out the argument that all beings should be treated in accordance not with their intelligence but with their capacity to feel pleasure and pain, the core tenet in the fight against what Singer calls “speciesism.” Soon Hsiung became a vegan, a Buddhist, and then an animal rights activist, leafleting on campus and handing out DVDs of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ documentary Meet Your Meat.
Over the next few years, Hsiung started down the path of a career in behavioral economics and law; at one point he cowrote a paper with his mentor, the nationally influential law professor Cass Sunstein, on how climate change would impact animal populations. He was fascinated by Sunstein’s theories of social change—how surfacing implicit preferences or emotions in individuals can trigger social “cascades,” chain reactions in which a person’s admission of their unspoken feelings or experience can unlock many others to do the same. But over time he began to feel detached from his legal studies and depressed about the academic future ahead of him.
So one night, on a whim, he decided to trespass into a slaughterhouse intending to rescue an animal. Chiappetti Lamb and Veal was one of the last operational meat facilities in urban Chicago, a building Hsiung had walked by repeatedly, whose smells and sounds had haunted him. He entered around 2 am, simply opening a gate and walking in.
Inside the company’s stockyard, he found an enclosure of baby cows and lambs cowering in the corners of their pens. He hadn’t bargained for the animals’ size and quickly realized he wouldn’t be able to take any of them out by himself. He left empty-handed but found himself returning to the slaughterhouse again and again. On some of those trips he brought a cheap point-and-shoot camera with him. But the resulting photos never quite captured the feeling of being there. “The key details—the quivering of the lambs, the patches of rotting skin—were lost,” he would later write. “And the earth-shattering experience of being surrounded by baby animals suffering in filth would remain locked in my mind.” (The company that now owns the Chiappetti facility said it couldn’t comment on its conditions in the early 2000s.)
By that time, Hsiung was working as a visiting law professor at Northwestern University. But he decided to quit his job. He spent the next four years breaking into slaughterhouses and farms around the country by night to rescue animals, working as a full-time activist until he ran out of money and then taking jobs in corporate law to raise enough to continue. Those early operations were anything but open rescues—even now, Hsiung refuses to share details about them, claiming that doing so would endanger collaborators in fragile legal situations. Still, they allowed him to hone the playbook that DxE would use years later, scouting targets, practicing investigative techniques, learning about the supply chain of the US meat industry.
From the beginning, Hsiung believed open rescues would be far more effective. “If we really believe in what we’re doing, we can’t be scared to show people,” Hsiung says. But to take that risk, he’d need a grassroots movement and a media strategy strong enough that every prosecution or lawsuit the group’s rescues triggered would only amplify its message and recruit more followers.
Before cofounding Direct Action Everywhere, Hsiung attempted to launch four other groups, each of which fell apart in turn. Finally, in 2012, he moved to the Bay Area and tried a different strategy, emulating the group Improv Everywhere, whose performance art stunts had gone viral on social media. DxE tried applying the same tactics to animal rights protests, staging die-ins at Chipotle restaurants around the country or lining up to read poems in front of a grocery store meat counter while employees hurled abuse at the protesters.
In 2014, DxE carried out its first open rescue, breaking into a Petaluma, California, egg farm that supplied what it claimed were “cage-free” eggs to Whole Foods. Inside, the activists recorded video that showed hens crammed into crowded sheds—hardly what most consumers would imagine “cage-free” means—and taking out two symbolic hens that they left at an animal sanctuary. (Whole Foods declined to comment for this story.)
By the time DxE released that video, in early 2015, Hsiung had his eyes on a bigger target: Circle Four Farms, one of the world’s largest pig farms. The sprawling facility in Milford, Utah, which belongs to the Chinese-owned conglomerate Smithfield Foods, reportedly sends 1.2 million pigs to slaughter every year from its hundreds of barns, a complex that DxE nicknamed the Deathstar.
In 2007, Circle Four had pledged to phase out the gestation crates that keep pregnant sows practically immobile. In 2013, the company released a YouTube video that showed its new group housing system, with animations and cheery music. Hsiung was skeptical of those claims, which entailed a massive project that Smithfield had said would cost $300 million. So he and DxE began to make plans to go in and see the farm for themselves”.
Ex-racehorse found starving nine months later
The recent expose by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation showed champion racehorses ending their days in a Queensland slaughterhouse being abused by sadistic staff. The Australian racing authorities promote a ‘retirement plan’ so racehorses can live out their days in peace, but the only place many are retired to, is the knackery.
The shocking reality revealed by undercover cameras for this program reveal what is happening not only in Australia, but all over the world. Racehorses are a commodity – and aare used as such; when they are no longer profitable, they are often discarded by unscrupulous owners and trainers. Often they are sold on without any vetting, reference checks, or follow up. They pass through several owners and finally end up having their throats slit and being turned into dog food, often when they have only lived a fraction of their natural lifespan.
In this article we read about United States thoroughbred ‘Willow’ (aka Time for Parading), who was racing just months before she was found half starved and rescued.
It is time to stop using and abusing noble horses Animals are not ‘ours’ to do as we like with. Please don’t bet on horses and don’t attend races.
PIG FARM LIKE ‘STEPPING INTO HELL’
Today grassroots animal action group Direct Action Everywhere (DXE) entered a pig breeding farm in Quebec and refused to leave.
Videos posted by members of the protest group show animals covered in filth, scrambling for food, crammed into tiny spaces without room turn around and physically separated from their young.
“I’m honestly just numb right now… what I witnessed in this ‘family farm’ in Quebec was the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life, it was like stepping into hell,” wrote DXE member Niño Bonito of the experience.
These hell-holes must be shut down.
Read the article and watch the video here
SHOCKING CRUELTY EQUALS STANDARD PRACTICE IN SLAUGHTER INDUSTRY
Secret cameras in recent years have exposed the shocking reality of what goes on behind closed doors of slaughterhouses. Slaughterhouses are a blight on our humanity and must be closed down.
Read the Sentient Media article, and watch the video. WARNING: Contains Graphic and Distressing Images
Quote:
“At this slaughterhouse in Lombardy, Italy, the violence captured by investigators is agonizing to watch – let alone feel. The video shows pigs being slaughtered while still conscious. Farm operators stab pigs with an electric prod. The pigs heave their bodies at the cold metal bars of the slaughterhouse, trying in vain to escape. Many pigs were left to bleed to death while still conscious. Sadly, this is standard practice across the animal farming industry”.
Avian Agony: A tragic incident highlights the reality for billions of chickens in the meat industry
The suffocation this week of nearly 200,000 broiler chickens owing to equipment failure in Helensville, New Zealand, is profoundly shocking. It is especially heartbreaking for those who know what beautiful, sentient chickens routinely go through in commercial poultry operations.
From the moment they are poured from buckets onto the gigantic shed floor as hatchlings – they have been debeaked without painkillers so they cannot hurt themselves or each other in the extreme frustration of their living conditions – their lives are sheer hell. Artificially bred for rapid growth that induces lameness and other health issues, living in cramped and artificial conditions, standing and lying in their own feces and with ammonia burns from resting on waste-strewn litter, a percentage never even reach slaughter weight at 6 weeks old. They die of heart failure, and even starvation if they cannot move to feed. When they are shipped off to the slaughterhouse to have their throats slit they are still infants. Indeed, their cries resemble ‘peep peep peep’, like the babies they still are.
This monumental injustice against sentient beings is legal in every country where chickens are industrially raised for meat. Here in New Zealand we have a law that recognises animals as sentient, and yet we keep chickens – and pigs, as well as other animals – in such conditions. Clearly, the law is a farce.
In this article End Animal Slaughter contributor LYNLEY TULLOCH puts the recent Helensville trajedy into context, and asks us to make the right ethical and moral choices by leaving animals off our plate and adopting a vegan diet.
The recent deaths on 4th December of between 180,000 and 190,000 chickens in a west Auckland poultry farm was devastating. These birds, housed in a large indoor shed, suffocated due to a power cut and subsequent generator issue. No air was being pumped into the shed, an alarm also failed, and a worker found them all dead in the morning.
It’s distressing for those of us who consider the sentience of animals of high importance; that is, the recognition that these birds were capable of suffering.
The birds died of asphyxia – which to ancient Greeks meant “without pulse”. It now denotes “suffocation” – death by oxygen deprivation. This occurred for the chickens as a result of their air supply being cut off. The birds were entrapped in a confined space and there was inadequate oxygen for them to respirate.
These birds have now been interred on a worm farm, ashes to ashes, and bird to worm. A reversal if you will of the natural cycle of birds eating worms . Except most modern day chickens bred for meat will never encounter a worm in their lives, growing up as they do in huge (hopefully ventilated) sheds (unless there is a power cut).
This is a huge failing on the part of the farm. The Hellensville farm supplies to Tegel who has a monopoly on the chicken meat market in New Zealand. Tegal claims on its website that, “when you choose a Tegal product, you can be assured that the utmost care has been taken to ensure we have raised happy and healthy chickens”.
The incident at the Helensville farm is so clearly in breach of Tegal’s claims that it brings into question anything else they may say.
Animal welfare expert Marcelo Rodriguez Ferrere has been quoted as saying the deaths were “catastrophic” and ”among the largest number of any stock animal I’ve heard dying en masse”
Would that be outside of the numbers of chickens killed daily in slaughterhouses in New Zealand for meat? Not trying to be funny, but really it depends how you look at it.
Source: Atom Emet.
Probably the vast majority of people in New Zealand most likely care about what animals endure before they are killed for meat. They hope that the animal has had a good life.
But what constitutes a good life and who is defining the parameters? If you think the chicken now sitting stuffed on your table had a good life, think again. Recent reports suggest that free range meat chicken claims fail to stack up. What consumers should know is that there is no official certification system for free range and no auditing for whether chickens have access to the outdoors. In New Zealand there are only codes of welfare which include minimum standards. These, however, are not legally binding and are only set to encourage high standards. There are no penalties for non-compliance.
Free range is problematic for chickens bred for meat in any case. The rapid growth of these birds, coupled with lameness and large flock size mean that many can never even hobble to the outdoor area (if indeed there is one).
Those who prepare a chicken or two for the Christmas table all the while lamenting the deaths of the suffocated chickens should look deeper into the practices of meat chicken farms. By buying the chickens and fueling the market, consumers are participating in one of the most depraved industries in New Zealand.
Most chickens raised for meat in New Zealand are housed in large sheds that require the maintenance of an artificial environment to keep them alive. These sheds may be up to 2250 meters squared and hold 40,000 adult birds. They are hot housed like tomatoes, and they are experiencing a breach of animal rights (at least they would if they had been bequeathed to them). Make no mistake , chickens bred and raised for meat are some of the most exploited and abused animals on the planet, and that is even without been suffocated in a shed.
Many New Zealanders love to eat these chickens. New Zealand raises about 120 million meat chickens every year. According to the Poultry Industry Association, New Zealanders eat around 20 chickens a year, or 37.5 kilograms of chicken meat.
People in New Zealand are generally aware of the concept of good animal welfare. It would shock them to know what many chickens raised for meat go through. These chickens who are called commercial strain broilers have been selectively bred over the years to favour rapid weight gain. They double in size every week. These chickens reach ‘slaughter weight’ at around 5-6 weeks. As a result they are often afflicted with lameness, breast blister and heart failure. They are literally teetering on the verge of structural collapse when they are killed.
Footage by animal rights group Direct Animal Action of a poultry farm last year revealed horrific suffering. Birds lay prone on their backs dying and chicks walked around with deformed legs.
But the worst is yet to come. There are well known issues associated with killing birds en masse in modern day slaughter houses. Research published in the International Journal of Poultry Science claims that electrical stunning of birds is not always reliable. In addition, ”when the neck is not properly cut some birds will enter the scalding tank before they are dead and some may display obvious signs of consciousness”
Maybe the suffocated chickens had a merciful death compared to what was to come for them. If we want to see an end to animal abuse and suffering, there is only one thing to do. Leave chicken off our plate, and adopt a vegan diet.
Try a vegan diet for a month. Sign up for Veganuary 2020.
Barbaric religious ritual needs to be stopped forever
The largest and bloodiest animal sacrifice on the planet is currently taking place in a remote corner of Nepal, in defiance of a 2015 supreme court ruling that the five-yearly bloodbath should not go ahead in 2019.
In a field near the small temple of Bariyapur, thousands of buffalos stand meekly. Walking among them are animal welfare groups, their hands smeared with mud and blood, trying to soothe the animals, and giving them a little food and water. Soon some of the 1,000 butchers hired for the month-long festival, mostly drunk and unskilled at slaughter, enter the field and begin to hack at the bulls, cows and calves with their knives and machetes. The air is filled with agonised bellows and cries, and the field is drenched with blood. By the end of the festival more than half a million animals will have been hacked to death to bring good luck to worshippers of blood-thirsty Gadhimai, a Hindu goddess of power.
This barbaric tradition is an affront to every sane human being. The whole world needs to bring pressure on Nepal to make sure it does not happen in 2024, nor even again.
Read Indian writer and activist Rukmini Sekhar’s account of a barbaric religious ritual.
It is time to abolish fishing and fish farming…
Fish are smart enough to use tools, can communicate and have distinct personalities. It has been established beyond doubt that they feel pain.
So how is it that we can justify torturing them in their trillions, every single year, for our palates?
Photo essay with words by Joy Ann Satchell and Sandra Kyle
Fish are the original vertebrates, our direct evolutionary ancestors. Scaly pioneers with small limbs, they crawled from the sea and colonized the land, and gave rise to our species.
But we have forgotten our evolutionary debt to them. They are our silent victims. We don’t hear them scream when they’re impaled on hooks, or when the hooks are ripped from their delicate mouths. Yet they have nervous systems that comprehend and respond to pain.
We invade their territory and trap them in vast nets. They are wrenched from their ocean home into open air, and go through the agony of suffocation. Such are their numbers that the fishing industry can only measure their loss in tonnes.
We haul them in, and leave them to die in agony, wounded, ‘drowning’ in the air.
Human greed is not even satisfied with this holocaust. We farm them as well.
Salmon farms, where they live in cramped and polluted cages, unable to escape, fighting for space, fighting for freedom. Many die of disease and despair even before slaughter weight.
A glint of scales, a swatch of luminescence… fish are beautiful and complex creatures. These graceful denizens of the ocean have as much right to live as you and I. Let them live in their home, undisturbed, free and fulfilling their own destiny.
Let’s remember the silent, forgotten victims of our world.
All living creatures have their own purpose in life’s circle….
Let’s abolish cruel fishing and fish farming forever.
Watch the Video of ‘drowning’Joaquin Phoenix calling for kindness to fish
In the wake of Lewis the Koala’s death, there is Hope
Millions are grieving the death of Lewis the Koala but his legacy will live on, writes End Animal Slaughter contributor LYNLEY TULLOCH.
Ellenborough Lewis – or Lewis for short – has died. The rescued koala received substantial burns in the bushfires in Australia and was rescued by a passerby. Taken to Port Macquarie Koala Hospital, Lewis was treated for burns and dehydration and given pain relief. Unfortunately he was just too badly burned. Port Macquarie hospital uploaded a post on Facebook saying he needed to be euthanized as he would not be able to recover from the burns.
Just yesterday I wrote an article about Lewis on this website, believing that he would live. But today, all hope is lost. Lewis could not survive the burns to his hands, feet, arms and the inside of his legs, so was humanely euthanised. Lewis had nowhere to go when his home burst into flames. Neither did the hundreds of others who did not make it out of the Australian bushfires.
Koala Conservation Australia President Sue Ashton has been quoted as saying “We think most of the animals were incinerated – it’s like a cremation. They have been burnt to ashes in the trees.”
It’s a devastat
ing thought, and brings a whole new meaning to the quote ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’. Personally, I don’t care much for such quotes. I know we must all come to an end someday, but no one deserves such a horrific death as being cremated alive.
As a child, I lived in Australia for some years. Koalas always fascinated me. They blended into the environment so perfectly, so intricately connected with their home. They are a unique part of the Australian landscape. Reports of them becoming ‘functionally extinct’ are devastating.
It’s difficult to know how to write about such a tragedy without reducing it to platitudes. The bushfires raise so many issues that need to be addressed. Climate change and the increasing risk this poses for bushfires; loss of the diversity of life on the planet; the human impact on the natural environment as we encroach on wildlife habitat. These issues are all so significant in the wake of the bushfires.
I come back to myself as a child, experiencing the koala with all my senses, the way children do. I return to my memories at a time when hope was a natural way of being.
I also keep coming back to Lewis. All animals have an inner life that is often not recognizable to humans. They are conscious of their existence and experience a range of emotions with intensity. They are not ‘lesser beings’ than us. They are our fellow Earthlings, and many of them have been here a lot longer than we have.
As I watched Lewis’s story unfold, along with millions or others, I hoped for his survival. I hoped the little guy would have another chance at life. I hoped life would rise once more from the ashes. That is one thing that is so great about both humans and nonhuman animals – we have hope. We have poetry in our hearts, and songs in our veins. We have life. We are all interconnected and yet we all experience the world in our own way.
Lewis had his own way of experiencing the world, it was unique and special to him. He was an individual and once we named him, we felt that he was one of us. We thought we knew Lewis. We cared about him and his life, like we would never have if he was ‘just another koala’ sitting in a tree. Once the poetry died in Lewis’s heart, we died a death too.
Somewhere deep inside us, we know that life would not be so special without our fellow Earthlings alongside us for the journey. We know that life’s poetry requires diversity to thrive and to have meaning.
We must not let hope die. For Lewis, let’s honor his memory by fighting against koala habitat destruction so they do not become extinct. Stuart Blanch from WWF Australia has said that while koalas may become functionally extinct in some areas, there are still large areas with viable koala populations. They will only go extinct, he says, if we make them.
And so our hope resides with people who work to save koalas. Blanch goes on to say that koala habitat will regenerate and this reforesting will build their numbers again. One of the main threats is humans encroaching on their habitat and clearing land. Blanch says: “You can bring more koalas back if you stop bulldozing trees and start letting trees regrow.”
To Lewis, I dedicate life’s song. For Lewis I cry. For Lewis I hope. Thankyou to Toni Doherty, the compassionate grandmother who rescued Lewis, and to the staff at Port Macquarie Koala Hospital who tried so hard to save his life. You are our heroes, our Heroes of Hope.
Ellenborough Lewis, b 2005?- d 2019
