Great White abused on Auckland beach

At a popular beach on the upper reaches of coastal Auckland on the second day of the new year, a crowd gathered around an unusual sight: that of a Great White Shark slowly dying on the beach.  The 2.75 female had apparently been netted on purpose (against the Law as the species is fully protected in New Zealand waters), and the fishermen were seen kicking the shark, taking selfies and laughing.    When beachgoers tried to intervene the men ‘became intimidating’.

Although there were attempts by a lifeguard and members of the public to refloat her, she returned to the beach where she died moments later.    Behind the disrespect and abuse shown by some to an individual sentient being, is a sorry story of greed and superstition that permits us to cause great pain and distress to sharks, and endanger their existence in our oceans.   
Great White Sharks are on the World Wildlife Fund’s 10 Most Wanted list.   Trade in their teeth, jaws and fins, as well as commercial fishing, are making them vulnerable.   We kill around 100 million sharks a year, and a great deal of this is to satisfy the demand, mainly in China, for shark fin soup.  Shark fins are a so-called  ‘delicacy’ and are one of the world’s most expensive seafood items.   
Sharks are not ‘seafood’, they are sentient beings.  As such, we can imagine the terrifying experience they endure when they are hauled out of their environment, have their fins sliced off, and then thrown back into the ocean to die slowly from blood loss, stress, or suffocation. 
It is not sharks, but humans, who are the biggest and cruellest predator of them all.  We are  the reason tens of millions of  sharks and trillions of other sea animals are killed every single year.  We are  the reason why there may not be any fish stocks left in the sea at all by 2050. 
If we don’t want to cause the global collapse of marine ecosystems, and the untold suffering of sharks and other fish, then the most effective thing we can do is to stop creating a demand for their flesh, and become vegan. 

Read the article

 

They Aint Going To The Party – The Dark Side of Horseracing

A highlight of the New Zealand Social Calendar is the Boxing Day Races, held at Ellerslie Racecourse in Auckland.

The 160-year institution sports the Queen City’s most colourful fashion, hospitality and entertainment.

Racegoers converge to imbibe food and alcohol, to place a bet on high-octane thoroughbreds, and to outdo each other in the fashion stakes.

 

 

On Boxing Day 2019 they were met with another group of people, also glamorous….

… who were protesting cruelty to racehorses.

 

QUICK FACT ONE:  There is no retirement plan for racehorses.   After winning thousands of dollars for their owners and trainers, when they are no longer profitable they are sold on.  The former equine athletes can pass through multiple owners and often nobody knows what happens to them. 

 

 

QUICK FACT TWO: Racehorses are stabled up to 22 hours every day prior to training, and many of them suffer from boredom.

 

 

QUICK FACT THREE:   90% of racehorses suffer from bleeding in the lungs directly as a result of over-exertion. 

 

QUICK FACT FOUR:  90% of racehorses suffer from stomach ulcers.  This is thought to be brought on as a result both of an unnatural feeding regime, and stress.

 

QUICK FACT FIVE:   Horses are goaded on the racetrack by use of the whip.  Whipping the horses over and over again inflicts physical and psychological pain, and increases the likelihood of injury.  

 

QUICK FACT SIX:  It is estimated that around 2,500 New Zealand unprofitable horses are sent to slaughterhouses every year to be exported as horse meat overseas, or turned into pet food.   This is known as ‘wastage’ in the Industry.

 

Seventeen horses died on New Zealand racetracks in 2019.   

To find out more go to horseracingkills.com

Watch the ABC expose: The Final Race

Photo credits: Christian Huriwai

 

Their foie gras won a medal, but this is how their ducks are treated!

Foie gras, (French: “fat liver”), a delicacy that belongs to the ‘protected cultural and gastronomical heritage of France’, is the liver of a goose or duck that has been fattened by a process of force-feeding. The practice has its roots in ancient Egypt, and was adopted by the Romans and mediaeval Jewry through to modern-day France. The product is produced and consumed worldwide, particularly in Europe, the United States and China.  However, as a result of the campaigns of Animal Rights activists,  awareness about the unbelievable cruelty  that produces foie gras has grown, and more and more restaurants and retailers are withdrawing it from their menus and shelves. 

Read the Mercy for Animals article that reveals the cruel forced gorging of male ducks on a prize-winning French foie gras farm, while female ducks (not used for foie gras) are left to slowly suffocate. 

Excerpt:

‘When the male ducks are several weeks old, they are immobilized in narrow metal cages and force-fed with air pumps. The extreme overfeeding causes the young ducks to gasp for breath and gives them terrible diarrhea. According to L214, the process is so physically traumatizing that 10 times more ducks die during the force-feeding period than under normal conditions’.

See also Mercy for Animals article:

Excerpt:

‘MFA’s undercover investigator documented a culture of cruelty at HVFG, including: Workers violently shoving metal pipes down ducks’ throats, dead ducks — killed by the cruel force-feeding process — callously thrown away into trash bins, birds with open, bleeding wounds left to suffer without proper veterinary care, and fully conscious ducks being shackled upside down and having their throats cut open’.

 

Duck killed through forced feeding at Hudson Valley Farm (see above article)

End Animal Slaughter’s SANDRA KYLE does weekly vigils at slaughterhouses in her home town of Whanganui (New Zealand) under the worldwide Animal Save banner.

In her latest blog she writes that sheep are much more intelligent and emotional than we give them credit for.

 

SLAUGHTERHOUSE VIGIL, Whanganui 29 December 2019

I went to the sheep and bobby calf slaughterhouse first today, wondering if at Xmas time things would be winding down. Not a chance. Two unloaded trucks came out just minutes after I arrived, and then within half an hour a three-tier truck packed with lambs came. I couldn’t move fast enough to get close up shots before the truck entered the slaughterhouse, but you can clearly see how jammed it was, with the little ears and noses of precious innocents sticking out of the side openings.

 

We arrogantly and ignorantly say that sheep are ‘dumb’ but it’s not true. Studies have shown that just about everything we believe about them is wrong. Scientists have established that sheep are intelligent and they are capable of problem solving, including negotiating their way out of a complex maze. In particular, they have very good memories. They recall at least 50 individual sheep and humans for years, and will avoid people who have not been nice to them. They build lifelong friendships, stick up for one another in fights, and get depressed when their friends are sent to slaughter. That’s not dumb.

 

Yet even if they were dumb, it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference. They are living beings. They are sentient. They can suffer. They have loved ones. They have an interest in their lives, and they want to continue their lives. We have no right to jam them into trucks and send them to have their throats slit so we can snack on their flesh. It’s just so very barbaric and it’s just so very wrong. When are we going to stop this?

 

Yet even if they were dumb, it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference. They are living beings. They are sentient. They can suffer. They have loved ones. They have an interest in their lives, and they want to continue their lives. We have no right to jam them into trucks and send them to have their throats slit so we can snack on their flesh. It’s just so very barbaric and it’s just so very wrong. When are we going to stop this?

I have often thought I would like to be like Dr Doolittle and understand all the animal languages. I would like to know what they are saying to us, and to each other. I really don’t think it can be that hard. If we were more loving and sensitive, I am sure we could all be ‘animal whisperers’. It could be that some time in the future all beings will understand each other, intuitively. I can’t tell you how much I would like to be around when and if that happens. 

 

The sheep I saw made no sounds today, but at the pig and cattle slaughterhouse up the road I heard many heartbreaking ‘moos’. I stood with my signs on the roadside for a while but the devilish wind that hangs around that murderous place fought to tear the sign from my hands, and made it almost impossible for me to stand upright. I have brittle bones and was afraid of falling, so gave up after about twenty minutes. I needed a break, so went to see my friend Joy at her Rescue, and hugged some bunnies, a kitten, and two four day old ducklings (who were hatched by a hen).  I fondled the ears of two sheep, enjoyed a vigorous licking by two doggies, and scratched the backside of a miniature horse.  Hey Presto!  I immediately felt better!  If only all animals could be loved and well treated, instead of exploited, abused and slaughtered….

The staff were still there when I got back to the slaughterhouse, and standing on a stepladder I managed to get a couple of shots over the fence before the groundsman, hosing feces away from the under the animals, saw me. Please spare a moment to look at the faces of these beings who, tomorrow morning, will be no more. This is why we bear witness to animals at slaughterhouse gates. To acknowledge their existence, to tell them we love them, and to say that we’re so sorry that we cannot save them. We always hope to provide some comfort to the frightened animals, and when we’re able to make a connection, we even succeed.

 

 

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 foodcrammed 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”.