Author: Sandra Kyle

‘An Earth Without Insects?’

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle

 

Eighty percent of the biomass of insects has disappeared in just thirty years, and intensive agriculture, particularly the heavy use of pesticides, is  the main driver of this collapse.    

The decline in populations worldwide is devastating not only for the insect species but also for many birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish that eat insects.     It should also be of huge concern to us:- 

“Insects are at the heart of every food web, they pollinate the large majority of plant species, keep the soil healthy, recycle nutrients, control pests, and much more.”

Widespread deforestation to grow grains to feed cattle over the last 30 years is a major cause.   Stopping animal agriculture is one of the ways we can begin to reverse this worrying trend.   

Insects are an essential part of the web of life.  We need to learn the lesson that exterminating other species for our own ends is not only morally wrong, it is bringing about devastation in the natural world.  

Read the Guardian article here:

Slaughterhouse Vigil, Land Meats, Whanganui, NZ: 28 July 2019

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle

End Animal Slaughter website owner Sandra Kyle does regular weekly, or twice-weekly, slaughterhouse vigils in her home town of Whanganui, New Zealand, under The Save Movement banner. 

Sandra has been bearing witness to animals going to slaughter for nearly four years, and putting her accounts and photos up on her Facebook page.  Here is her latest blog:-

‘I think of them now as the sun goes down and the temperature drops and the only comfort they have is the warm bodies of their friends. Tomorrow morning these warm bodies will become slabs of meat. If you are reading this and you eat meat, please think of them as you fill your supermarket trolley this week’.

SLAUGHTERHOUSE VIGIL, Whanganui, 28 July, 2019

Whanganui was in communicative mode today. In the two hours we were in front of Land Meats we received more than usual toots from the roughly 400 cars that passed (I’m basing this estimate on previous counts). I have recently had my cataract-correcting lenses cleaned, and my vision has improved. As a result I can now clearly see the expressions on the faces of the car drivers.

They fall into two categories: those who don’t react/those who react, roughly 50/50 percent. Of those who don’t react they are just pretending they didn’t see us. 😊 Of those who react we have the hornblowers (the ones who give short toots are approving, those who sit long and loud on the horns are usually hostile), the smilers, the friendly wavers, the stoney-facers, the gesturers (thumbs up and down, middle finger up), the headshakers (up and down and side to side) the yellers of expletives (the majority) the yellers of encouragement (only a few) the neck craners, the jaw droppers, a couple of times we have had the throwers (fruit and glass beer bottle) and for the first time today a man who took his hands off the steering wheel to clap!

Only one small truck arrived, and while Monica stayed on the road with the signs, I tried to get some photos. Several cows had their faces above the truck as the driver stood on the roof using his electric prodder. I kept missing the good shots (typical), but in the photos I took you can see part of the cows’ heads. The groundsman came out and took photos of me taking photos of them. As usual, I had a lump in my throat and not feeling at all humorous, but I should have done some posing. Like a model. Haha. Only thing is my sense of humour seems to escape me when I’m at the slaughterhouse. I wonder why…

I sang to the cows as they waited to be offloaded, and then sneaked around the side and took a very short video of them in the pen. I think of them now as the sun goes down and the temperature drops and the only comfort they have is the warm bodies of their friends. Tomorrow morning these warm bodies will become slabs of meat. If you are reading this and you eat meat, please think of them as you fill your supermarket trolley this week.

 

They Tried to Escape Their Fate

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle

Standing at slaughterhouse gates bearing witness to the animals, Save Movement activists all over the world take photos and videos to share on social media.  This documentation clearly show that animals are worried and fearful.    On the trucks going to the slaughterhouse, on live export ships, animals also sense something is wrong.  A tiny minority make a bid to escape.  Here is some of their stories, that often ended very badly for the animal.  We have to stop treating sentient beings as commodities.   When enough people transition to a vegan diet, slaughterhouses will close.

Read the Mercy for Animals article about animals who tried to escape:-

A Plate of Scrambled – Roosters?

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle | 2 Comments on A Plate of Scrambled – Roosters?

What’s behind your plate of scrambled eggs? End Animal Slaughter guest contributor SARAH OLIVER reminds us of a couple of things we may have overlooked.

 

It often crosses my mind that our ability to ignore the blindingly obvious makes us, and those we share the planet with, vulnerable.  A case in point is the short and painfully difficult lives of chickens.  We love to eat their flesh, as well as the fruits of their female reproductive system.  Tucking into our plate of scrambled eggs, chances are we don’t consider two major components that have been involved in producing our eggs.      One is the mysterious case of the disappearing males, the other is the ability of the modern layer hen to produce huge quantities of eggs.  No other bird in history has ever done this, for a good reason.

Before humans intervened, the ancestors of today’s hens produced around 15 eggs a year, in spring.   However, in order to satisfy our seemingly unquenchable desire to eat eggs, modern birds have been bred to lay on and on and on, at huge detriment to their small bodies, leading to them being ‘spent’ at only a fraction of their natural lifespan.

Hens can undergo horrific conditions as a result of this intensive laying.  Treated not as sentient beings but as food production units on factory farms, we can only imagine the toll on their frail bodies.  Alongside other conditions and infections, they suffer from osteoporosis.     So much calcium is used in the production of egg shells that the birds are left with brittle bones.  I once talked to an ex-chicken factory worker who said that when handled, their wings can just snap off because their bones are so weak.

The second component we miss when we are tucking into our scrambled eggs is that hens produce both male and female offspring, so what happens to all the males?    They cannot lay eggs so the Industry considers them a financial liability.   They therefore get rid of them as soon as possible after birth. For the baby roosters this means getting minced alive, (imagine throwing baby chicks into a blender) or gassed, within a few hours of hatching.  This is what we do to over 3 million baby birds each year in New Zealand.  In the UK it is 30 million, so we can only imagine the numbers of roosters macerated worldwide.

In 2001 I read an article about workers in New Zealand who were being re-organised into different roles in the egg industry.   Their new role in the production line was to feed otherwise healthy rooster chicks into the shredding machine. Their complaint was that they were ill-prepared to deal with the emotional difficulties of this role.   It is not hard to imagine how horrific such a job would be, spending your day picking out and throwing live healthy baby animals into a machine that grinds them up.  But this is what goes on, and this is what we ask of others when we purchase eggs. If we are horrified at the thought of mincing baby animals alive, then is it right to ask others to do it for us?

 

We live in an overpopulated world which makes our food choices more weighted than they have ever been. Bombarded with marketing and often conflicting nutritional advice on an unprecedented scale,  eating eggs and chicken meat seems to be winning on the promotional front.  We are turning away from red meat, but consuming a staggering amount of chickens and eggs worldwide.  According to one estimate, we kill more than 50 billion chickens every single year, an astronomical number that does not include the killing of male chicks, and hens who can no longer produce eggs.

Such is the prevalence of chickens, those we eat and those who lay our eggs, that there has been the suggestion that a mark of our modern world will be the chicken bone fossil record we will leave behind us.  Who would have thought that the humble chicken would be the defining characteristic of our age?

There is a huge amount of often contradictory information from the medical, food and dietary industries about the kind of food we should be eating, and we are also subjected to compelling advertising from the fast food industry. This can muddy the water when it comes to deciding what food is best for us.   I have a suggestion that may help our decision.   What if we put ethics and compassion first, then decide what goes on our plate from there?

I have a suggestion that may help our decision.   What if we put ethics and compassion first, then decide what goes on our plate from there?

There is a wealth of researched information on the benefits of eating a vegan, plant-based diet.  Fortunately,  over the last few years many plant-based alternatives to eating animals have emerged, and there is a wide variety to choose from.   Eating a plant-based diet is now easy, and like any other diet, it can be cheap or expensive, whole food or processed, depending on your preference and budget.  I think it is time that we rethink our relationship with the most prevalent, invisible, abused bird on the planet, the poor old Gallus gallus domesticus.  Just as we can only empathise, but not experience, another human’s pain, we cannot know precisely the level of suffering that goes on for a chicken. However, we can be sure that as sentient, complex, social animals, they do suffer, as they endure the cruel and unnatural life we have subjected them to.

Surely no plate of scrambled eggs is worth all that suffering.    Vegan scrambled eggs, on the other hand, are just as tasty, and cruelty-free.

 

 

Q&A: Casper Hilt, Full-time Animal Activist

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle | 6 Comments on Q&A: Casper Hilt, Full-time Animal Activist

Jobless and without a home, 36-year-old Danish activist CASPER HILT works 60 hours a week to change the reality for sentient beings.   

 

Was there anything in your background that set you on your path to animal activism?  

Personally, I have experienced a lot of injustice, suffering and illness in my life and I believe it shaped me into choosing, not just a compassionate way of life, but an active compassionate way of life. I truly want to help the helpless, those who suffer the most and those that are oppressed, and I can’t find anything in life that’s more important than that. I believe that if you have experienced suffering yourself, your empathy towards others’ sufferings grows, it’s like you lose the privilege of ignorance. Their pain becomes your pain, becomes our pain.

How long have you been vegan? 

6 years and 6 years as an AR activist. I was vegetarian before that for many, many years. I thought I was doing all I could do and I believe I lived a very ethical life, but I was lied to. When I finally discovered the truth about the wool, dairy and egg industries I got very upset.  Then I saw Gary Yourovsky’s ‘best speech you will ever hear’ on YouTube, and this was the turning point for me. I knew for the first time in my life, from the bottom of my heart, that I would never support any form of animal exploitation ever again. A fire was lit.

You gave up your job as a psychiatric nurse to work 60 hours a week on Animal Rights activism; street outreach, bearing witness at slaughterhouses, factory farms rescues, writing, editing videos and movies, administering your website and so on.   Activism is therefore your full-time job.  How do you manage to pay the bills?

First of all, to make this possible, I lowered my expenses to an absolute minimum. I don’t have a home; I have no mortgage or rent or any other large expenses, so I really don’t have any bills to pay. Secondly, I never use any money on myself. I never go out, never buy new clothes, never go on vacation etc., so I don’t need money for that either. I only use money for travelling to where I do activism, for staying there and to put  food in my mouth. Mostly it can be done quite cheaply.  I wish I had funds to buy better equipment though, I would love to be able to upscale  the quality of material I get with different types of cameras and lenses, lights, microphones etc. Hopefully I will be able to afford that in the near future.

What is the hardest part of your work emotionally? 

Not being able to stop this,  or save everyone I meet!   But also to become aware of the massive scale of the abuse, something I didn’t know before I witnessed it myself.    On another note, It is  truly draining and emotionally hard to witness and experience how the vegan and AR community has so much infighting, drama, cliques, backstabbing and so on,  and that is mostly why I choose to work alone. I am not here for saving a community, I am actually not even a very social person,  I am only here for helping the animals and inspire other people to do the same.

What is the most dangerous part?

The most dangerous part is the emotional stress. If you break (and you will break from time to time), you change, you will never be the same again. That doesn’t necessarily have to be bad, it can ‘just’ lead you in to a different path, because you now have new experiences and newly-gained wisdom. But we all need some kind of balance to not break completely. We need to be able to do this for as long as possible, as this massive abuse won’t end tomorrow or the day after.

What is the most rewarding part? 

To see that you make a difference.   If you just continue and do this long enough, you will see the differences you have made, the people you have changed, and the animals you have saved. And you will see that the stone you threw in the water actually created ripples that will work for you on and on and continue to make an impact.  The work you do has an impact, maybe not instantly, but it has an impact. Sometimes it has a huge impact.

What skills do you need to make you a successful activist?

Any skill! I always tell people to find out what they are passionate about and good at and then do way more of that!  Become even better and grow, become even more skilled at your skills!   And be open to that fact that whatever your passion is, it might change after a while and that is alright.   Sometimes a path leads to another path and that is completely fine, you are growing and you are being a stronger advocate for the animals. But the best skills are, if you ask me, integrity and decency.   Do what you do and let others do what they do. Let your inner fire guide you and let what other people think of your work, be their business. Treat others with decency, loyalty, respect and kindness, and ignore those who might not treat you with the same decency.

The film making, video editing and so on that you do.  Do you have any formal training in this or do you learn as you go along? 

I am self-taught and I was terrible at it to begin with, but I am so glad I continued and therefore got better. Hopefully, in a couple of years, I will think that some of the work I do now is ‘terrible’, because I will have become even better at it at that time!

Do you believe that animal exploitation is coming to an end? 

Yes, I do believe that and I do believe it will happen faster than we expect.
On the other hand, to be more specific, I do not believe we will end animal exploitation totally, we will end 99 percent of it. There will always be criminals and sociopaths who will exploit those who are the easiest to exploit, but we will change the cultural and legal paradigm into not accepting exploitation of vulnerable innocent beings, and we will succeed in shifting all animal exploitation industries in to cruelty-free and plant-based industries instead, using modern knowledge and modern technology instead of slaves.   Everyone will agree that it is the best solution for all of us, both humans and non-humans, as well as our planet earth.   It will not be easy to get there, it will be with great cost and great loss for many of us, that’s why we have to be united.

How can our readers follow you, and support the valuable work you are doing?

I’m working on a website as we speak, but it continues to be delayed because of other more important projects. But people can always find me and follow my work, contact me and support me on ‘Casper Hilt – Animal Rights Activist’ on both Facebook, Instagram and Youtube.  On www.Patreon.com/casperhilt you can directly support my work for our beloved animal friends.

 

Thankyou for your time Casper.

The conflict between instinct and intellect in exploiting animals

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle

End Animal Slaughter contributor PAUL STEVENSON writes that we will never self-actualise so long as we cause other animals to suffer.

 

Man is a social, innately moral, animal. When we treat others with kindness and respect we feel good about ourselves, but being cruel destroys us.

Human beings have needs of different kinds, ranging in priority from basic survival needs to ultimate self-fulfilment. Like the foundations of a building, basic needs must be met before we can begin to achieve higher ones. The psychologist Abraham Maslow termed these our “Hierarchy of Needs”

Abraham Maslow (1908 – 1970) was a famous American clinical psychologist. He was particularly specialized in the area of humanistic psychology and became famous with his ground-breaking theory on the Hierarchy of Needs. This model is known as Maslow’s pyramid.

 

All humans have similar survival needs – food, clothing, shelter – and all share similar needs for esteem and a feeling of belonging. However, although our highest needs are more personal in nature, morality and integrity are absolute essentials. The house of our being requires a sound foundation and the mortar of integrity to bind all the bricks.

The brain is central to this issue. The human brain is comprised of parts of varying ages dating back millions of years to our earliest reptilian ancestors. In general, older parts perform automatic, unconscious maintenance activities and control unthinking responses. Only the cerebral cortex, the most recently evolved part, permits rational thought. Although we can think rationally, we are not fully rational animals as much of our behaviour is controlled by the ancient, unconscious parts of the brain.

Internal conflicts can arise when we get different messages from both older and newer parts of our brain. Man has an instinctive preference for animal foods as they contain complete protein and are rich in energy and vitamins. People consume them eagerly whenever they get the chance. We also crave foods high in fat, sugar and salt as these are of high survival value and scarce in nature. Although instinct tells us that such foods are highly desirable, our cerebral cortex – our “advanced” brain – allows us to consider them rationally.

 

We are thus confronted with the following problems regarding the consumption of animal products:-

1. We know we can nourish ourselves perfectly adequately on plant foods alone, without having to consume animal foods.

2. We know that the consumption of animal foods causes unspeakable suffering to the animals concerned because we can empathise with them as we too are animals.

3. We know that the production of animal foods causes immense environmental destruction both on land and at sea. It also creates hunger and poverty as it is grossly wasteful of energy and requires vastly more land than is available.

4. We know that eating animal foods causes many “lifestyle diseases” that lead to debilitating illness and premature death.

Thus we face a dilemma over the consumption of animal foods. We appear to be driven by ancient, unthinking instinct, but our rational mind tells us that eating animal products is indefensible. Because we are moral beings we must deceive ourselves to justify it. When we deceive ourselves we generate self-contempt and damage our self-respect. However, self-respect, or self-esteem, is a primary psychological human need as Maslow shows. We must approve of ourselves in order to function fully as human beings.

Integrity and morality are essential components of self-esteem. A false image of integrity may fool others but never oneself. When we deceive ourselves we cannot be comfortable within ourselves and cannot have peace in our heart.

The ultimate irony therefore is that when we steal from others we end up stealing that which is most precious of all from ourselves: our self-esteem and integrity. The harm we so callously inflict on others returns to destroy us along with our dreams.

If we wish life to be good we must practise it. Intellect must rule instinct. Good lives are moral lives. Moral lives consist of showing respect, not just to other humans, but especially to those poor innocent creatures whose lives we so abominably abuse by our execrable behaviour. Only when we do that can we achieve our full human potential, ultimate “Self-actualisation”.

From Dingley Dell to Hell: The Ethical Pork Myth

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle

There is no ethical way to kill an animal who doesn’t want to die, writes End Animal Slaughter contributor LYNLEY TULLOCH

 

The slaughterhouse is something many of us would like to pretend doesn’t exist. It sits, ghastly and imposing, behind high walls. It represents the interface between life and death; a breathless and relentless killing machine.

Restaurant entrepreneur and chef Allegra McEvedy expressed this discomfort in an article she wrote for The Guardian in 2014. McEvedy wrote, “I’m fine with dead animals, but the point at which animals cross from living to lunch is one that makes me wobble a bit”.  McEvedy set up a ‘pork-focused’ or ‘pig based’ restaurant in 2013 which aimed to source pig meat sustainably, and “venerate the pig in all its manifold glory”. The restaurant closed in 2016, but not before many pigs lost their lives in a bizarre act of supposed veneration.

Veneration is a strong word. It means to worship and respect. I am not sure how McEvedy can claim that using a pig’s very flesh for food, and to profit from that, is synonymous with veneration.

We see this kind of hypocritical attitude regularly. It fits squarely in the welfarist camp where the animal unknowingly trades their life (by way of humane slaughter – an oxymoron) for being bred into existence and cared for. The animal has a good (albeit short) life while the person gets their pound of flesh.

The human gets to have the animal’s body and eat it too. It’s just – well, they would rather not see the life being taken. No one wants to do that, not really. Some people try to transcend this discomfort by deciding that if they can take an animal’s life or witness the slaughter of said animal then it justifies the act. We’ve all heard it being said before – “I won’t eat it if I cannot kill it myself.”

To return to McEvedy, she visited the pig farms where the pigs for her restaurant were sourced from. She cuddled day old piglets at Dingley Dell (I kid you not) specialized outdoor farm. She thought about her values of high animal welfare and integrity. And then she decided to tour the slaughterhouse where the pigs were to be killed. As she said, this was her first visit to a slaughterhouse despite being in the food business for 20 years.

The slaughterhouse was called Burrow’s Abattoir, a mid-sized independent outfit.  It’s the place that Dingley Dell sends pigs to be killed. It kind of sounds like a children’s book, a Disneyland version of happily ever after.

The slaughterhouse was called Burrow’s Abattoir, a mid-sized independent outfit.  It’s the place that Dingley Dell sends pigs to be killed. It kind of sounds like a children’s book, a Disneyland version of happily ever after.

Except it wasn’t. McEvedy describes how the slaughterhouse killed 4,000 – 4,500 pigs a day. They kill them by putting them in gas chambers after being ‘trotted along in single file up a ramp’. McEvedy says she can hear squeals, but she also concedes that pigs are notoriously chatty and she doesn’t really think they are distressed. The pigs enter a chamber of highly concentrated CO2 and after 90 seconds are dead.

The 90 minutes is debatable. There is evidence that pigs may suffer for several minutes in agonizing pain.

That’s it. McEvedy is now happy to move along the chute to the blood-letting area satisfied that she is still in Disneyland. The pigs however, are being hooked up, bled out and split in two and their innards (grey with a hint of mauve according to McEvedy) are released.

And of all this, McEvedy says she feels more a sense of awe than of disgust. She writes, “I can feel my eyes widening and over the next hour I am aware they’ve taken on a look somewhere between intently engaged and slightly demonic”.

Her words, not mine.

And of all this, McEvedy says she feels more a sense of awe than of disgust. She writes, “I can feel my eyes widening and over the next hour I am aware they’ve taken on a look somewhere between intently engaged and slightly demonic”.

Her words, not mine.

There is something disquieting about the sense of awe and enjoyment some people get from watching animals being killed. Not everyone cares that animals suffer, or that their lives mean nothing more than a bacon sandwich. The human mind is capable of twisting reality into shadows that obscure the truth.

Before you buy into the line of ethically sourced, sustainable meat it is important to disperse the shadows. What McEvedy did not say in her article is that pigs suffer horribly in gas chambers. There is a myth that gas chambers are humane. The pigs struggle for air and convulse before death. Undercover footage reveals the harrowing reality. When the pigs inhale their lungs, eyes and mouth become acidic and they burn from the inside out. Their squeals are harrowing, and not the kind of ‘chatter’ one would associate with pigs socializing.

Carbon dioxide gas chambers are not a happy way to end a pig’s life.

Instead of a Disneyland fairytale of happy ever after, these pigs go from Dingley Dell to Hell.

Shortly after she wrote this article the author, currently in Fiji, heard the bloodcurdling screams of a pig being slaughtered in a back yard.   It left her shaking, and unable to forget what she had heard.  (Internet photo).

 

 

Voices for Animals Across the Years: Richard Ryder

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle

Richard Ryder has a special place in the history of the Animal Rights movement.  His influence was seminal in the early development of the notion of rights for animals,  and he is also the inventor of the term ‘Speciesism’, a central idea in the movement.

Richard Ryder was born Richard Hood Jack Dudley Ryder in Dorset, England in 1940.  After studying psychology and working in animal research laboratories, he began to speak out about animal experimentation, organising protests against animal experiments and also blood sports.  In the late 1960s when he was working as a clinical psychologist, he joined a group of young philosophers and writers loosely centered around Oxford University called the ‘Oxford Vegetarians’ or the ‘Oxford Group’.  In 1971 a book of selected essays emerged from the group, called ‘Animals, Men and Morals’  which argued clearly in favour of animal liberation/animal rights, rather than simply for compassion in the way animals are used.  The editors wrote in the introduction: “Once the full force of moral assessment has been made explicit there can be no rational excuse left for killing animals, be they killed for food, science, or sheer personal indulgence.”  These were truly groundbreaking ideas at the time.

In 1970 Ryder had a Eureka moment when he thought of the word ‘Speciesism’ to describe the assumption of superiority that humans have over non-human animals.  This prevalent notion has led to the widespread cruelty and abuses of countless billions of sentient beings, as well as the endangerment and extinction of many species, and environmental damage.  Shortly after this a young moral philosopher who had been influenced by the Oxford Vegetarians approached Ryder about a book he was planning, and asked him to co-author it with him.   The young man was Peter Singer, and the book the seminal Animal Liberation, published in 1975.  Ryder turned down the offer, but his influence was demonstrated in Singer popularizing the term ‘speciesism’ in the book.

Ryder’s accomplishments in the field of animal rights are extensive.   In 1972 he joined the Council of the RSPCA, becoming its chairman in 1977, during which time he tried to get rid of reactionary and pro-hunting elements within the organisation.  Also in 1977 he helped to organize the first academic animal rights conference, which was held at Trinity College, Cambridge.    The conference produced a “Declaration against Speciesism”, signed by 150 people.  In the 1980s he toured Europe, America and Australia, appearing on television and lending his assistance to campaigns to protect whales, seals, elephants and farm animals.     In 2004 he became Director of the Political Animal Lobby and later became Mellon Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Tulane University, New Orleans.

In the early 2000s, after a long and hard campaign, Ryder established the Eurogroup for animals – the major coordinating and lobbying organisation in the European community,  who “speak for animals and for the millions of European citizens who are concerned about the way animals are treated”  The group was instrumental in animals now being recognised in EU law as sentient beings.

Ryder has written ten non-fiction books on animal rights, psychology and moral philosophy, including Animal Revolution (2000), Painism (2003), and also a novel, The Black Pimpernel.   Now approaching eighty years of age, Ryder is still active writing and giving interviews, continuing his life-long work on behalf of the other animals that mankind has so unjustly exploited and caused to suffer.

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Posted on | by Sandra Kyle

Activists have been campaigning for years against the cruelty of industrialised farming and the horror of slaughterhouses,  and progress is being made.   The numbers of people beginning to wake up to the effects of animal agriculture not only on the animals but also on human health and the entire planet is growing, and meat-eating is declining in the western world.

Meat-free eating is also on the rise in Spain,  A 2017 survey found that 57% of Spaniards wanted to go meat-free due to feeling sympathy with the animals.  However, an enormous high-tech pig slaughterhouse is due to open its doors for ‘business’ in Huesca, a city in Aragon.  This slaughterhouse, which will be the biggest in Europe,  plans to employ around 1,600 people, and slaughter seven million pigs per year, 30,000 every single day.    The project is backed by the Spanish Government, and the operation is also offering vocational training certificates in ‘slaughterhouse skills’.

There is a lot of opposition to the project, and the person in charge is currently in prison in Hungary for money laundering, tax fraud and labour irregularities.    It is possible that it will not go ahead after all, and if it does it will be short-lived, as the developers are failing to read the prevailing zeitgeist.

There is no longer any place for slaughterhouses in society.  We should be tearing them down, not building more.

 

Read the article:-

‘Possibly The Greatest Crime in the History of the World’

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle

Israeli historian and Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem YUVAL NOAH HARARI has written a number of best selling books including Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2014), Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016) and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018).    

In this GUARDIAN article he claims the fate of farm animals is not an ethical side issue, but concerns the majority of Earth’s large creatures: ‘tens of billions of sentient beings, each with a complex world of sensations and emotions, but which live and die on an industrial production line’.  

Professor Harari states that since we are on the cusp of being able to reshape the future through biotechnology, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, in designing this brave new world ‘we should take into account the welfare of all sentient beings, not just of Homo sapiens.’

Industrial farming, he claims, is ‘possibly the greatest crime in the history of the world.’ 

Read the Article:

‘It Just Seems Like An Obvious Moral Issue’

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle

In her new book, ‘Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals’, Harvard professor Christine Korsgaard argues that we are not inherently more important than other animals.  Our own family is more important to us than our neighbour’s family, but that doesn’t mean that family is inherently less valuable than our own.  The same applies to other animals.

Animals value their own lives to which they have as much right as we do to ours.   They are sentient, conscious beings.  What, then, are they doing on our plates?

Read the article: