Author: Sandra Kyle

A message from Thich Nhat Hanh

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle

The article below was written by Buddhist monk, teacher and author, THICH NHAT HANH, and we have reprinted it with original illustrations of New Zealand native plants and animals by Alex L Scott.   

“This is the kind of awareness, the kind of awakening that we need, and the future of the planet depends on whether we’re able to cultivate this insight or not. The Earth and all species on Earth are in real danger. Yet if we can develop a deep relationship with the Earth, we’ll have enough love, strength and awakening in order to change our way of life”.

If we cultivated a reverence for ‘Mother Earth’ and all life that depends on her, we could not kill other beings.  With the consciousness Thich Nhat Hahn talks about in this article, it would be literally impossible to massacre billions of our fellow beings every year.  The world would be transformed.

 

We and the Earth are one

The Earth is our mother, nourishing and protecting us in every moment–giving us air to breathe, fresh water to drink, food to eat and healing herbs to cure us when we are sick. Every breath we inhale contains our planet’s nitrogen, oxygen, water vapor and trace elements. When we breathe with mindfulness, we can experience our interbeing with the Earth’s delicate atmosphere, with all the plants, and even with the sun, whose light makes possible the miracle of photosynthesis. With every breath we can experience communion. With every breath we can savor the wonders of life.

We need to change our way of thinking and seeing things. We need to realise that the Earth is not just our environment. The Earth is not something outside of us. Breathing with mindfulness and contemplating your body, you realise that you are the Earth. You realise that your consciousness is also the consciousness of the Earth. Look around you–what you see is not your environment, it is you.

Great Mother Earth

Whatever nationality or culture we belong to, whatever religion we follow, whether we’re Buddhists, Christians, Muslims, Jews, or atheists, we can all see that the Earth is not inert matter. She is a great being, who has herself given birth to many other great beings–including buddhas and bodhisattvas, prophets and saints, sons and daughters of God and humankind. The Earth is a loving mother, nurturing and protecting all peoples and all species without discrimination.

When you realize the Earth is so much more than simply your environment, you’ll be moved to protect her in the same way as you would yourself. This is the kind of awareness, the kind of awakening that we need, and the future of the planet depends on whether we’re able to cultivate this insight or not. The Earth and all species on Earth are in real danger. Yet if we can develop a deep relationship with the Earth, we’ll have enough love, strength and awakening in order to change our way of life.

Falling in love

We can all experience a feeling of deep admiration and love when we see the great harmony, elegance and beauty of the Earth. A simple branch of cherry blossom, the shell of a snail or the wing of a bat – all bear witness to the Earth’s masterful creativity. Every advance in our scientific understanding deepens our admiration and love for this wondrous planet. When we can truly see and understand the Earth, love is born in our hearts. We feel connected. That is the meaning of love: to be at one.

Only when we’ve truly fallen back in love with the Earth will our actions spring from reverence and the insight of our interconnectedness. Yet many of us have become alienated from the Earth. We are lost, isolated and lonely. We work too hard, our lives are too busy, and we are restless and distracted, losing ourselves in consumption. But the Earth is always there for us, offering us everything we need for our nourishment and healing: the miraculous grain of corn, the refreshing stream, the fragrant forest, the majestic snow-capped mountain peak, and the joyful birdsong at dawn.

True Happiness is made of love

Many of us think we need more money, more power or more status before we can be happy. We’re so busy spending our lives chasing after money, power and status that we ignore all the conditions for happiness already available. At the same time, we lose ourselves in buying and consuming things we don’t need, putting a heavy strain on both our bodies and the planet. Yet much of what we drink, eat, watch, read or listen to, is toxic, polluting our bodies and minds with violence, anger, fear and despair.

As well as the carbon dioxide pollution of our physical environment, we can speak of the spiritual pollution of our human environment: the toxic and destructive atmosphere we’re creating with our way of consuming. We need to consume in such a way that truly sustains our peace and happiness. Only when we’re sustainable as humans will our civilization become sustainable. It is possible to be happy in the here and the now.

We don’t need to consume a lot to be happy; in fact we can live very simply. With mindfulness, any moment can become a happy moment. Savoring one simple breath, taking a moment to stop and contemplate the bright blue sky, or to fully enjoy the presence of a loved one, can be more than enough to make us happy. Each one of us needs to come back to reconnect with ourselves, with our loved ones and with the Earth. It’s not money, power or consuming that can make us happy, but having love and understanding in our heart.

The bread in your hand is the body of the cosmos

We need to consume in such a way that keeps our compassion alive. And yet many of us consume in a way that is very violent. Forests are cut down to raise cattle for beef, or to grow grain for liquor, while millions in the world are dying of starvation. Reducing the amount of meat we eat and alcohol we consume by 50% is a true act of love for ourselves, for the Earth and for one another. Eating with compassion can already help transform the situation our planet is facing, and restore balance to ourselves and the Earth.

Nothing is more important than brotherhood and sisterhood

There’s a revolution that needs to happen and it starts from inside each one of us. We need to wake up and fall in love with Earth. We’ve been homo sapiens for a long time. Now it’s time to become homo conscius. Our love and admiration for the Earth has the power to unite us and remove all boundaries, separation and discrimination. Centuries of individualism and competition have brought about tremendous destruction and alienation. We need to re-establish true communication–true communion–with ourselves, with the Earth, and with one another as children of the same mother. We need more than new technology to protect the planet. We need real community and co-operation.

All civilisations are impermanent and must come to an end one day. But if we continue on our current course, there’s no doubt that our civilisation will be destroyed sooner than we think.

But if we continue on our current course, there’s no doubt that our civilisation will be destroyed sooner than we think.

The Earth may need millions of years to heal, to retrieve her balance and restore her beauty. She will be able to recover, but we humans and many other species will disappear, until the Earth can generate conditions to bring us forth again in new forms. Once we can accept the impermanence of our civilization with peace, we will be liberated from our fear. Only then will we have the strength, awakening and love we need to bring us together. Cherishing our precious Earth–falling in love with the Earth–is not an obligation. It is a matter of personal and collective happiness and survival.

VOICES FOR ANIMALS ACROSS THE AGES: LOREN EISELEY

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle

Loren Eiseley  (September 3, 1907 – July 9, 1977) was an American anthropologist, philosopher and natural science writer.   During his lifetime he received many honorary degrees for his accomplishments.   A ‘scholar of imagination and grace’,  dubbed ‘the modern Thoreau’,  he taught and wrote from the 1950s through the 1970s.

Eiseley’s reputation was established primarily through his books, including The Immense Journey (1957), Darwin’s Century (1958), The Unexpected Universe (1969), The Night Country (1971), and his memoir, All the Strange Hours (1975).

His beautiful prose was written with a sense of reverence before the natural world, and the mysteries of life.  Eiseley was an evolutionist, and both understood scientifically, and felt intuitively, the interconnectedness of all beings.  

 

‘THE STAR THROWER’

The famous ‘Starfish Story’ is based on an original story by Eiseley called  The Star Thrower’,  which appeared in his book ‘The Unexpected Universe’.  Here is an excerpt:-

I have caught a glimpse of what man may be, along an endless wave-beaten coast at dawn. It began on the beaches of Costabel. I was an inhumanly stripped skeleton without voice, without hope, wandering alone upon the shores of the world. I was devoid of pity, because pity implies hope… I concealed myself beneath a fisherman’s cap and sunglasses, so that I looked like everyone else on the beaches of Costabel, which are littered with the debris of life. There, along the strip of wet sand that marks the tide, death walks hugely and in many forms. The sea casts them repeatedly back upon the shore. The tiny breathing pores of starfish are stuffed with sand. The rising sun shrivels their unprotected bodies. The endless war is soundless. Nothing screams but the gulls. In the night, torches bobbing like fireflies along the beach, are the sign of the professional shellers. Greedy madness sweeps over the competing collectors, hurrying along with bundles of gathered starfish that will be slowly cooked and dissolved in the outdoor kettles provided by the resort hotels for the cleaning of specimens. It was there that I met the star thrower. As the sound of the sea became heavier and more menacing, I rounded a bluff into the full blast of the offshore wind. Long-limbed starfish were strewn everywhere, sprawling where the waves had tossed them as though showered down through the night sky. The sun behind me was pressing upward at the horizon’s rim ~ an ominous red glare amidst the tumbling blackness of the clouds. Ahead of me, over the projecting point, a gigantic rainbow of incredible perfection had sprung shimmering into existence.

 

Toward its foot I discerned a human figure standing, as it seemed to me, within the rainbow. He was gazing fixedly at something in the sand. He stooped and flung an object beyond the breaking surf. I labored another half a mile toward him and by the time I reached him, kneeling again, the rainbow had receded ahead of us. In a pool of sand and silt a starfish had thrust its arms up stiffly and was holding its body away from the stifling mud. “It’s still alive,” I ventured. “Yes,” he said, and with a quick, yet gentle movement, he picked up the star and spun it over my head and far out into the sea. “It may live if the offshore pull is strong enough,” he said. In a sudden embarrassment for words I said, “Do you collect shells?” “Only ones like this,” he said softly, gesturing amidst the wreckage of the shore, “and only for the living.” He stooped again, and skipped another star neatly across the water. “The stars,” he said, “throw well. One can help them.”

‘THE JUDGEMENT OF THE BIRDS’ is another famous Eiseley work.

Original watercolour ‘SPARROW’ by Alex L. Scott

I have said that I saw a judgment upon life, and that it was not passed by men. Those who stare at birds in cages or who test minds by their closeness to our own may not care for it. It comes from far away out of my past, in a place of pouring waters and green leaves. I shall never see an episode like it again if I live to be a hundred, nor do I think that one man in a million has ever seen it, because man is an intruder into such silences. The light must be right, and the observer must remain unseen. No man sets up such an experiment. What he sees, he sees by chance.

 

You may put it that I had come over a mountain, that I had slogged through fern and pine needles for half a long day, and that on the edge of a little glade with one long, crooked branch extending across it, I had sat down to rest with my back against a stump. Through accident I was concealed from the glade, although I could see into it perfectly.

 

The sun was warm there, and the murmurs of forest life blurred softly away into my sleep. When I awoke, dimly aware of some cornmotion and outcry in the clearing, the light was slanting down through the pines in such a way that the glade was like some vast cathedral. I could see the dust motes of wood pollen in the long shaft of light, and there on the extended branch sat an enormous raven with a red and squirming nestling in his beak.

 

The sound that awoke me was the outraged cries of the nestlings parents, who flew helplessly in circles about the clearing. The sleek black monster was indifferent to them. He gulped, whetted his beak on the dead branch a moment and sat still. Up to that point the little tragedy had followed the usual pattern. But suddenly, out of all that area of woodland, a soft sound of complaint began to rise. Into the glade fluttered small birds of half a dozen varieties drawn by the anguished outcries of the tiny parents.

 

No one dared to attack the raven. But they cried there in some instinctive common misery, the bereaved and the unbereaved. The glade filled with their soft rustling and their cries. They fluttered as though to point their wings at the murderer. There was a dim intangible ethic he had violated, that they knew. He was a bird of death.

 

And he, the murderer, the black bird at the heart of life, sat on there, glistening in the common light, formidable, unmoving, unperturbed, untouchable.

 

The sighing died. It was then I saw the judgment. It was the judgment of life against death. I will never see it again so forcefully presented. I will never hear it again in notes so tragically prolonged. For in the midst of protest, they forgot the violence. There, in that clearing, the crystal note of a song sparrow lifted hesitantly in the hush. And finally, after painful fluttering, another took the song, and then another, the song pass-ing from one bird to another, doubtfully at first, as though some evil thing were being slowly forgotten. Till suddenly they took heart and sang, from many throats joyously together as birds are known to sing. They sang because life is sweet and sunlight beautiful. They sang under the brooding shadow of the raven. In simple truth they had forgotten the raven, for they were the singers of life, and not of death.

VOICES FOR ANIMALS ACROSS THE AGES: ELLA WHEELER WILCOX

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle
Ella Wheeler Wilcox (November 5, 1850 – October 30, 1919) was an American author and poet. Her works include Poems of Passion, and Solitude.   She coined some memorable phrases, including  “Laugh, and the world laughs with you; weep, and you weep alone”.
Her poems, written in rhyming verse, were filled with insight, and though not highly critically acclaimed were widely accepted and loved by the public. Her works popularized what at the time was known as ‘New Thought’ embodying the belief that all life is connected spiritually as well as physically, and that people are spiritual beings.  As ‘Voice for the Voiceless’,  her most famous Animal Rights poem shows, she believed that animals also have souls.   Some of her most popular works were ‘Poems of Passion’, (1883) A Woman of the World’ (1904)‘Poems of Peace’, (1906), and ‘Poems of Experience’ (1910). Her autobiography,  titled ‘The Worlds and I’, was published a year before her death.

‘You may choose your words like a connoisseur, And polish it up with art, But the word that sways, and stirs, and stays, Is the word that comes from the heart’.  Ella Wheeler Wilcox

 

 

THE VOICE OF THE VOICELESS

I am the voice of the voiceless; 
    Through me the dumb shall speak; 
Till the deaf world’s ear be made to hear 
    The cry of the wordless weak. 
From street, from cage, and from kennel, 
    From jungle and stall, the wail 
Of my tortured kin proclaims the sin 
    Of the mighty against the frail.

I am a ray from the centre; 
    And I will feed God’s spark, 
Till a great light glows in the night and shows 
    The dark deeds done in the dark. 
And full on the thoughtless sleeper 
    Shall flash its glaring flame, 
Till he wakens to see what crimes may be 
    Cloaked under an honoured name.

The same Force formed the sparrow 
    That fashioned man, the king; 
The God of the Whole gave a spark of soul 
    To furred and to feathered thing. 
And I am my brother’s keeper, 
    And I will fight his fight, 
And speak the word for beast and bird, 
    Till the world shall set things right.

Let no voice cavil at Science– 
    The strong torch-bearer of God; 
For brave are his deeds, though dying creeds, 
    Must fall where his feet have trod. 
But he who would trample kindness 
    And mercy into the dust– 
He has missed the trail, and his quest will fail: 
    He is not the guide to trust.

For love is the true religion, 
    And love is the law sublime; 
And all that is wrought, where love is not, 
    Will die at the touch of time. 
And Science, the great revealer, 
    Must flame his torch at the Source; 
And keep it bright with that holy light, 
    Or his feet shall fail on the course.

Oh, never a brute in the forest, 
    And never a snake in the fen, 
Or ravening bird, starvation stirred, 
    Has hunted its prey like men. 
For hunger, and fear, and passion 
    Alone drive beasts to slay, 
But wonderful man, the crown of the plan, 
    Tortures, and kills, for play.

He goes well fed from his table; 
    He kisses his child and wife; 
Then he haunts a wood, till he orphans a brood, 
    Or robs a deer of its life. 
He aims at a speck in the azure; 
    Winged love, that has flown at a call; 
It reels down to die, and he lets it lie; 
    His pleasure was seeing it fall.

And one there was, weary of laurels, 
    Of burdens and troubles of State; 
So the jungle he sought, with the beautiful thought 
    Of shooting a she lion’s mate. 
And one came down from the pulpit, 
    In the pride of a duty done, 
And his cloth sufficed, as his emblem of Christ, 
    While murder smoked out of his gun.

One strays from the haunts of fashion 
    With an indolent, unused brain; 
But his sluggish heart feels a sudden start 
    In the purpose of giving pain. 
And the fluttering flock of pigeons, 
    As they rise on eager wings, 
From prison to death, bring a catch in his breath: 
    Oh, the rapture of killing things!

Now, this is the race as we find it, 
    Where love, in the creed, spells hate; 
And where bird and beast meet a foe in the priest 
    And in rulers of fashion and State. 
But up to the Kingdom of Thinkers 
    Has risen the cry of our kin; 
And the weapons of thought are burnished and brought 
    To clash with the bludgeons of sin.

Far Christ, of a million churches, 
    Come near to the earth again; 
Be more than a Name; be a living Flame; 
    ‘Make Good’ in the hearts of men. 
Shine full on the path of Science, 
    And show it the heights above, 
Where vast truths lie for the searching eye 
    That shall follow the torch of love.

 

 

 

From Hatchery to Slaughterhouse – Born to Suffer and Die for our Food

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle

End Animal Slaughter contributor DEBBIE NELSON lends her voice to the voiceless.

 

In the Broiler Barn

Can you please help me?   I am living in a filthy shed with thousands of others. I’m only 42 days old but my body is growing so fast I can hardly stand up. There is no room to walk, no room to spread my wings.  My breast is so big I keep falling on my face.  I can feel my heartbeat faltering.  That’s because I have a chick’s heart in a grown body.

I can’t breathe. The smell in here is so bad. I’m standing in my own shit.  A lot of my friends can’t walk. Some have broken legs.  Their legs can’t hold the weight of their huge bodies.  Some are lying on the floor, already dead.

It’s so dark in here.  OH NO THE DOORS ARE OPENING! They’re pulling in trucks! The fork lifts are bringing in the crates. We run, peeping at the top of our lungs but we can’t escape. The men are grabbing us six at a time by our legs and throwing us in crates.   Oh, the pain!   I think my wing is broken. They are so rough with us, but there’s nothing we can do.  We are trapped.  They are loading us on to a big truck.

At the Hatchery

The rooster

I’m male and the chick next to me is female. We are two of the tens of thousands who have just hatched out of our eggs. The humans dropped us in a box, and then onto a moving lane.  We are little yellow balls of fluff, alert and curious, and looking around us.   The humans are picking us up and looking at our feathers.   Because mine are different from my hatch mate she and I are sent down different metal tubes. I get the tube of death! I’m falling into a grinding machine. I try to jump but the humans pick me up and throw me back.   I scream but my mother cannot hear me.   I have never met her so how can she save me?   What have I done to deserve this fate?  There are only seconds left.  I’m looking down into the grinder. I can see the ground up chicks that went before. I’m in.

The hen

I was sent down the female tube. A human hand grabbed me, put me in a sharp machine and cut off my beak. The pain was unbearable. The chick who went before me died of shock! Then the humans stuck a needle in me. I don’t know why. Are they really going to cut off my toes? They are! I don’t think I can stand the agony.   Now they are putting me into a crate and loading me onto a truck.  I don’t know where I am going. I need my mother! Why don’t I have a mother?   I want to hide under her wing.

At the egg farm

I’m being sent to the egg farm.  They are roughly unloading me. I see where I’m supposed to live until I’m old enough to lay eggs. When I can lay eggs the humans will stuff me in a small metal cage with five or six other hens.  We can’t stretch our wings. We must stand or crouch on hard wires which cut our feet.  Our job is to lay eggs.   I slave away for the humans until I can’t anymore.

Three years have gone by, and I am spent. I have no feathers left, and my body is bruised and bleeding from rubbing against metal, and my cellmates pecking me.  I am taken from the cage put into another crate to be transported once again. I sense I’m going to a terrible place.

In The  House of Death

I have arrived after a long drive to a place that sounds and smells like death and misery. I have to wait 6 hours, anxious and in pain, before anything starts to happen.   Then some men arrive, and I am seized out of my transport crate. I see one of my kind thrown up into the shackles like a ball. Another one of us has their head torn off by the shackler. The humans are laughing.

I am turned upside down, held by my feet and hung up on shackles. I am fully aware of my dire circumstances. Now I’m moving down to a tub of water. My head is going into the water. The water feels alive with negative energy. Is this how I’m going to die? I lift my head up at the last minute.  My brain was not electrocuted,  and I’m fully conscious.  Next I’m dragged over a sharp device which cuts my throat. I struggle, and it’s not a clean cut.   I’m still conscious.   In pain, but conscious.   Next I’m dropped head first into scalding water. The searing pain overtakes my being, and then, nothing.  Finally it’s  all over.

It doesn’t matter if we are bred for meat or to lay eggs.  It doesn’t matter if the farm is labelled humane or organic we all come from the same place, and we all end up in the same place.  We all have to suffer traveling many miles without food or water and with no protection from the weather. Many of us are seriously hurt from the rough handling we experienced upon loading. Some of us are dead on arrival.

The suffering is endless.   Must this continue?   It doesn’t have to.   You, the

consumer, can stop this. Please do not buy any chicken products.

 

Old Anthem, New Anthem

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle | 4 Comments on Old Anthem, New Anthem

A Civil Rights Anthem from the 60s takes on a new meaning, writes End Animal Slaughter contributor, LYNLEY TULLOCH

 

Back in 1964 Bob Dylan wrote ‘The Times They are a Changin’ which became an anthem of change for the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements.   In 2019, while we are facing a myriad of environmental and social issues, the song remains a point of reference.

As we enter the 2020s, we have to realise that change is now imperative.   If we don’t change our ways very quickly, we may not have a habitable Earth to live on. Climate change, which in large part has been caused by industrial activity and animal agriculture, is creating massive biodiversity loss, collapse of ecosystems and extreme weather events.   Unless real and sustained efforts are made now, it will only get worse, with cataclysmic results

Everyone wants to avoid this, and everyone wants a change for the better.  Yet just what ‘better’ is remains a point of contention.  Some people want to continue with the old ways.   ‘Old ways die hard’, the saying goes, something that Dylan also recognized. Addressing mothers and fathers he talked about a new path, and told them:

‘Your old road is
Rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand’

The message then, and now, is to the older generation who want to stick to the old model to ‘get out of the way’.    It is our version of ‘human progress’ that has caused the disastrous problems we now face.  But our view of human advancement, based on human supremacy and domination over other animals and the environment, has ultimately been our downfall.

Fortunately, more and more people are recognising that the old methods of domination and killing are not the way forward.  More of us are recognizing that we need to respect the Earth and all her inhabitants, and work with her not against her.

One of the ways we need to change involves animal-based agriculture.  Raising animals for food is no longer sustainable.  The creation of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, water pollution, climate change, and land degradation are all significant problems associated with farming animals. And – dare I say it – rearing and slaughtering them, often in appalling conditions in order to eat them, is both barbaric and cruel.

No one wants to die, least of all the animal on your plate. We should not be breeding animals with the explicit purpose of consuming their flesh.  Not only does it cause them immense suffering and pain, study after study has shown that it is also bad for our health and the environment.

Calls to convert to a plant-based diet and plant-based sustainable agricultural systems have been met with resistance, yet more and more high-profile people are calling for this change.  For example, Oscar-winning director James Cameron and his wife Suzy Cameron Amis advocate that individuals shift to a plant-based diet, and countries begin the transition to plant-based agriculture.

Changing our diet is one, very significant way every single person can help to stop the disaster of climate change.   We have to accept that the need is urgent.   If we don’t become part of the solution rather than part of the problem, then we will only have ourselves to blame when we no longer survive as a species.

‘Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.’

Change is hard, but it is imperative we embrace it.   If you don’t want to be part of compassionate social change for the better, then you had better step aside.

 

How much cruelty would you like with your bacon?

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle

Pigs are highly intelligent and curious. They form strong attachments, have long memories, can solve puzzles, and like to play just for fun.  Studies have also shown that they experience complex emotions and can feel optimistic and pessimistic.  The suffering pigs endure in factory farms is unconscionable.

We have to stop killing pigs for food.

Learn more about pigs.

 

 

Q&A: Author and Investigative Journalist Gail Eisnitz

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle | 10 Comments on Q&A: Author and Investigative Journalist Gail Eisnitz

Remarkable undercover journalist and Author GAIL A EISNITZ answers End Animal Slaughter’s questions about her groundbreaking book SLAUGHTERHOUSE.  In her book Gail documented almost unbelievable transgressions against humane slaughter, causing cattle, pigs, horses and chickens to undergo agonising suffering at the end of their lives in American slaughterhouses.    Gail focuses on the industry and workers’ stories, and the result is a book that is heartbreaking, powerful and unforgettable.

 

Q:  Gail, did you always know you wanted to work with animals?  Where did your journey as an animal advocate have its roots?   

I knew that I wanted to work with animals when I saw a nature program on public television when I was in my early teens and it depicted two polar bear cubs on an ice floe looking up at the camera operator in a helicopter.  Their mother had just been shot and killed.  That image was so pathetically sad, it became seared in my brain.  A few years after that, I wrote a high school research paper on endangered species.  When I found out that the Passenger Pigeon, for example, which was once so plentiful in the US that flocks used to blacken the skies for miles, was extinct, I was appalled.  And I was hooked on saving animals, in one form or another.

Q:  Are you still working full-time at the HFA?  What does your job entail now?

Yes, I am still happily employed by Humane Farming Association where I have been chief investigator for 27 years.  I’m fortunate to not be running around the country like a crazy person investigating slaughterhouses anymore.  After my book was published, I focused largely on exposing conditions inside factory hog farms and dairies, where conditions are unequivocally far worse than those in slaughterhouses.  We held press conferences, ran newspaper ads, filed legal petitions for prosecutions with the states’ highest law enforcement officials, anything we could do to expose conditions inside factory farms.

Most recently, I have been working to reform the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Livestock Indemnity Program, which is a ridiculous government program that reimburses farmers and ranchers for animals who died in inclement weather, whether or not the producers took any action to protect the animals from dangerous weather conditions.  In other words, US taxpayers are footing the bill for millions of animals that freeze to death, suffocate in snow, drown in floods, or die from heat stroke because these animals are not provided adequate protections from harsh weather.  And I work on a regular basis on cruelty cases that come across my desk.  For example, right now, I have engaged the USDA and its investigative arm to conduct a criminal investigation into a large illegal slaughter operation in the western United States.

Q: You showed great tenacity in your investigation to bring the slaughterhouse atrocities to light, and to attempt to rectify great wrongs that were taking place not only against poor animals, but also against workers.   You seem to have compassion and a strong sense of  justice – Is this what drives you?

If you say so.  No, but seriously, if there are laws on the books that are going altogether unenforced, something has to be done.  Likewise, if animals are being dragged, beaten, strangled, skinned, scalded, and dismembered all while fully conscious, whether there’s a law or not, something has to be done.  And it’s the same with the workers.  They were being physically and emotionally destroyed, chewed up and spit out, wrecked for life.  Something has to be done.  Besides, who can sleep at night knowing these wrongs are being perpetrated against animals and humans.  You have no choice.  You just do what is in front of you.

Q: In your investigations you also found that political candidates were jumping into bed with mega factory farm owners, and the United States Department of Agriculture was accommodating the meat industry at the public’s expense.  Tell us about that.

The USDA is charged with two radically opposing missions.  The very same officials who are supposed to promote the sale of agricultural products are also charged with protecting consumers from contaminated meat and enforcing the Humane Slaughter Act.  The result of this duplicitous mission and the Department’s primary focus on marketing is that USDA’s ranks are filled with meat industry leaders who have demonstrated their abilities at increasing industry profits.  In SLAUGHTERHOUSE, I documented the fact that high-ranking officials with the National Cattlemen’s Association, the American Meat Institute, Livestock Industry Institute, factory farmers, and meat industry lobbyists, had all been appointed to senior positions of authority at USDA.  Including Secretary of Agriculture and Assistant Secretary of Agriculture overseeing marketing and humane slaughter.  With this crude revolving door, the USDA has literally allowed the regulated industry to police itself from inside the government.

In SLAUGHTERHOUSE, I documented the fact that high-ranking officials with the National Cattlemen’s Association, the American Meat Institute, Livestock Industry Institute, factory farmers, and meat industry lobbyists, had all been appointed to senior positions of authority at USDA.  The USDA has literally allowed the regulated industry to police itself.

Q:  How did things get so bad within slaughterhouses that cows were being skinned alive, pigs thrown into scalding water fully conscious, animals were routinely dragged and beaten and thrown half-dead on piles to die?

In the last few decades, thousands of small to midsized slaughterhouses in the US have been forced out of business by a handful of large, high-speed operations, each with the capacity to kill more than a million animals a year.  With fewer slaughterhouses killing an ever growing number of animals, slaughter line speeds have skyrocketed.

It goes without saying that everything boils down to money.  Today, the faster the slaughter line speed, the more money the slaughterhouse can make.  The problem also exists in the reverse:  when line speeds are so fast, a minute of downtime can spell a loss of hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars.  As workers struggle to keep up with outlandish line speeds, a production mentality has emerged in which the slaughter line does not stop for anything:  not for contaminated meat, not for ill or injured workers, and least of all not for slow or frightened animals.  With individuals required to kill as many as 1,100 pigs an hour, workers resort to brutal handling techniques to keep the line running and keep their jobs.

Sadly, the US Department of Agriculture is now implementing a “modernization” plan for the slaughter of pigs – just as it has already done for the nine BILLION chickens we slaughter annually in the US – turning over key inspection responsibilities to the pork industry.  While current regulations allow slaughterhouses to kill 1,100 pigs per hour – or one pig every three seconds – apparently that’s not fast enough for the pork industry.  The Trump Administration’s new regulations, to be rolled out this summer, will actually remove that cap.  That means meat packers killing 90 percent of the nation’s pigs will be given the go-ahead to operate at unrestricted line speeds, killing pigs as fast, and as recklessly, as they want.

The Trump Administration’s new regulations, to be rolled out this summer, will mean meat packers killing 90 percent of the nation’s pigs will be given the go-ahead to operate at unrestricted line speeds, killing pigs as fast, and as recklessly, as they want. 

Q: You tried to get the media interested in doing a story about your findings, but it was an uphill battle, why was that? 

The major networks here in the US were gung ho to produce the story.  But when push came to shove, after they had each invested many months into producing the story, they refused to air it.  In the end, they all claimed that the reason they refused to air it was because the topic was “too disgusting” and that their viewers would change the channel.  Could it be that their sponsors and advertisers included agribusiness and the meat industry?

It was like pulling teeth to get a reporter at The Washington Post to finally do the story, but when he did a front page story on my findings, the article made a seismic shift in funding for humane slaughter enforcement.

Q: What were your impressions of the people who work in slaughterhouses?

They worked extremely hard under grueling conditions, especially individuals from foreign countries who are more willing to put up with the unbearable conditions and pace.  Many workers told me they wear diapers, because they are not allowed to take bathroom breaks.  Jobs in chicken slaughterhouses are the most dangerous jobs in the country.  In poultry plants, employees work at such incredibly high line speeds that it would be hard for them to not get repetitive motion illnesses.  After their fingers, hands, and wrists no longer work, these employees are just tossed aside – put on light duty and then unceremoniously fired.  As far as workers in red meat slaughterhouses, it’s not surprising that many of the employees I met suffered from alcoholism and engaged in domestic violence – where they took out their frustrations on their wives and children.

Q  A few years down the track since you wrote your book, what has changed in slaughterhouses?  Have there been improvements or as things as bad as ever?

It’s hard to say.  The Washington Post story that I mentioned earlier resulted in millions of dollars of Congressional appropriations to enforce what until that time had been the zero-budgeted Humane Slaughter Act.  In other words, despite the fact that the law had been on the books for 48 years, no one had ever bothered to fund its enforcement.  So, as a result of those appropriations, there have been new positions established to enforce the law.  However, there still are no USDA inspectors stationed on a fulltime basis in the areas of the plants where the animals are slaughtered.  I did a public documents request a few years ago which revealed that animals were still being repeatedly stunned with ineffective stunning equipment, shackled and hoisted, and bled all while fully conscious.  And those were the animals that the USDA inspectors just happened to see.  And it’s hard for inspectors to know what is actually going on, because everything changes and slows down when an inspector enters the slaughter area.

Q: You were diagnosed with cancer during your investigations, and you yourself attribute the protracted extreme stress you underwent as its cause.    Thank goodness you are fine now, but writing this book really was a trial by fire for you, wasn’t it?   

I faced many deterrents in trying to document and expose slaughterhouse violations.  One supervisor at a national humane organization where I worked before coming to Humane Farming Association did everything conceivable to impede my efforts.  I had to quit my job.  He wound up in jail for embezzling, and is now facing life imprisonment for sex trafficking of a minor.  I struggled with difficult undercover cameras to get video evidence of violations, which I eventually got. The television networks refused to air my documentation.  One of my informants was stabbed to death and left to die in a garbage can.  I battled breast cancer while doing the investigation.  And then there were the other effects of stress that manifest both during the investigation and after my book was published.  Those were just a few of the obstacles I came up against while trying to expose the violations.  I guess it was a trial by fire in some ways.  As I said earlier, you just do what you have to do.  You do what is right in front of you.

Thank you for answering our questions Gail.

 

Do Insects Feel Emotions?

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle

When I moved into my new home just over a year ago I discovered that I had company.   Waking up at night and going into the kitchen I would regularly see at least one or two tiny cockroaches walking over the bench.   When I approached them they momentarily froze, then ducked for cover.

If observed behaviour is any indication, then it is reasonable to assume that my houseguests were feeling fear.  The questions must therefore be asked: if they can feel fear, then is it not reasonable to suggest that they can experience other emotions also?

Charles Darwin thought so, writing in his book   The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals that insects “express anger, terror, jealousy and love.”   The idea didn’t catch on however, and 150 years later, studying insects for intelligence is still an under-developed field.   The science of Entomology has been established for centuries, but until recently investigators concentrated on insect taxonomy and physiology, and how populations related to environment and agriculture.  Their behaviour was studied, but it was assumed to be ‘instinctive’, not intelligent.  Proposing to study insect intelligence and emotions would have gotten former generations of scientists laughed out of town.

Insects are not the easiest organisms to study however, let alone relate to, as they are so different to us.  They can be defined as ‘small invertebrate animals with an adult stage characterized by three pairs of legs and two pairs of wings’.    They are segmented, modular, and their nervous system is planned along decentralised lines.  An insect has many different sub-brains in different parts of its body, which feed into and can be controlled by a central brain but can also function separately. Even if the central brain of an insect stops working, so long as the leg sub-brains are intact, they can keep walking.

Since entomologists have been turning their attention to insect intelligence they have discovered problem solving, advanced communication, social skills, adaptability, and memory.  For example researchers from the University of Oxford’s Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour showed that fruit flies take longer to make more difficult decisions,  suggesting they ‘think before they act’.  Bees, when offered a reward from a perch of a certain colour, will return first to perches of that colour.   Bees are famous for the ‘waggle dance’, first described by Karl von Frisch.  When they have located a source of food bees return to their hive and through a complicated series of manoeuvres transmit the location and route to their mates, who then fly off to gather the food.

Thoughtful Drosophila?

Evidence is also emerging that so called ‘lower animals’ such as worms, can experience pain and suffering.  One striking example of this is the presence of hormone levels.  For example, just as certain hormone levels can validate the presence of pain in humans, when an earthworm is injured, its nervous system secretes an opiate substance that has the role of attenuating pain.

We humans are the indiscriminate Dispensers of Death to every other life form on the planet, including insects.  We kill billions of them every year largely through insecticides, and this has led to a massive decline in insect numbers.  Older citizens wonder what has happened to all the butterflies, bees, wasps, praying mantises, moths and dragonflies that used to be so common in their youth.   Insects pollinate blossoms, perform scavenging roles, and recycle nutrients back into the soil.    Their annhilation is just one part of the ‘sixth mass extinction’ currently taking place, brought about by human overpopulation, overconsumption, and wanton disregard for the rights of other species.

The jury may still be out on the true nature of insect intelligence, and their ability to feel (as opposed to ‘demonstrate’) emotions.  But if we are appalled at the thought of deliberately hurting sentient beings, then our annihilating thumbs and trigger fingers would do well to give insects the benefit of the doubt.    If you stick a cockroach with a pin and see it writhe, it is not unreasonable that it is feeling not only pain, but also negative emotions.

Fortunately, my cockroaches are in no danger at all of that.

Sandra Kyle

INDIA LEADS THE WAY IN ANIMAL RIGHTS LEGISLATION

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle

 

The Father of Modern India, Mahatma Gandhi, once said: ‘The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated’.  Decades after Gandhi pronounced these words Indian law makers in the states of Punjab and Haryana have passed groundbreaking legislation, ruling that all animals are legal ‘persons’, entitled to legal rights like human persons.

Echoing an order passed by him while sitting at the Uttarakhand High Court last year Justice Rajiv Sharma’s order stated:

“The entire animal kingdom, including avian and aquatic, are declared legal entities having a distinct persona with corresponding rights, duties and liabilities of a living person. All citizens throughout Haryana are hereby declared persons in loco parentis (responsible for a child in parents’ absence) as the human face for the welfare/protection of animals.”

Justice Sharma also stated: “We have to show compassion towards all living creatures. Animals may be mute but we as a society have to speak on their behalf. No pain or agony should be caused to the animals. Cruelty to animals also causes psychological pain to them. In Hindu Mythology, every animal is associated with god. Animals breathe like us and have emotions. The animals require food, water, shelter, normal behaviour, medical care, self-determination.”

In most of the world, if they have a legal status at all, animals are classed as ‘property’.  Animals were recognized as property in Law at a time when the general belief was that God had given humans special rights – they had ‘dominion’ over the animals.  Animals did not possess moral standing because they lacked rationality and autonomy.  They were mere machines, acting on instinct, incapable of thinking or feeling the way humans do.  As little as fifty years ago this belief (that quite obviously lacked common sense) still had currency.  For example, scientists were cautioned not to ‘anthropomorphise’ when studying animal behaviour.  However, much has changed since then.   Back in the 19th century Darwin made the irrefutable case that humans had evolved from animals, clearly asserting that emotions and not only physical forms had shown continuity through species.  Thousands of scientific studies conducted over the last forty years have now proven without doubt that animals feel physical pain and positive and negative emotions just like us. Consequently, assert philosophers such as Peter Singer, the interests of humans and animals should receive equal moral consideration.

Yet in the most places an animal has the same legal status as a ‘thing’ – a car, television set, or toaster for example.  What kind of law states that animals are more like a house or a pair of headphones than a human being?   It is clearly ludicrous.  Animals are not inanimate objects.  They have the capacity to suffer, and engage in intelligent thinking.   By categorising animals as property the law is treating them as non-sentient objects, making it more likely for us to treat them as if they were.

An animal is not a toaster!

The very welcome Punjab/Haryana ruling comes as there is a worldwide push towards recognising animals as ‘sentient’ under the law.  A number of countries and cities, including France, New Zealand, Brussels and Quebec now have formally recognized animal sentience.  This is the first step towards recognizing animals as ‘non-human persons’ – which should, by the way,  replace the word ‘animal’.  If pigs and chickens in factory farms were called ‘non-human persons’ and given rights more commensurate with people than with things, then it will be a lot harder to imprison, torture and slaughter them in their billions every single year.

In Justice Sharma’s ruling fish and birds will also benefit.  Plundering the ocean’s inhabitants, cramming fish so tight in tanks in polluted water where they can hardly move; keeping wild birds in tiny cages without ever being allowed out, or blasting them out of the sky to hunt them,  will also be difficult to justify when they have personhood status.

According animals ‘person’ status will make an enormous difference.   For example Justice Sharma included 24 individual welfare codes that would take immediate effect.    Animal activists in India, such as Karuna Society for Animals and Nature, Haryana-based Teachers Association For Animal Rights, and Government Minister Maneka Gandhi – a powerhouse who has done more for animal rights in India than any one person – will be rejoicing at this news.   Having recently returned from Haryana and witnessed for myself the reality of animal suffering in that state as it is all over India, I join them in their rejoicing.

The judgement still has to be ratified by India’s Supreme Court, but if all goes well a precedent will be set.  India has paved the way, and now it is up to the rest of the world to follow suit.     According personhood status should be a campaign priority for all those everywhere who work to relieve sentient beings from their sufferings.

Sandra Kyle

It’s Off to the Slaughterhouse for Racehorses Who Don’t Perform

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle

All over the world racehorses are killed when they are no longer profitable.   In the US, where horse slaughter is illegal, many are sent to Mexico where slaughter standards are lower.  Measures are being taken to try and improve the situation, but if horse racing didn’t exist neither would the problem.  The Racing Industry – which puts horses in harm’s way and creates an excess of animals to be turned into horse meat –  should be banned.

https://www.palmbeachpost.com/sports/20190523/racing-fans-likely-unaware-of-silent-slaughter-of-thoroughbred-horses