Author: Sandra Kyle
‘We’re in a fight for our lives’
In her article in ‘The Cap Times’, Patricia Randolph writes that ignoring climate change could lead to disaster in just a few years. We must change our eating habits to save the planet and our lives. In her article she also mentions End Animal Slaughter:
‘A new effort has emerged to end the slaughterhouses of the Western world by 2025: The website states: “There is an enormous amount of evidence that killing animals for food is a root cause of not only of enormous animal suffering but also global warming, biodiversity loss, human disease, and poverty in the developing countries.”
When one opens the website, a kill counter starts the count of animals being killed since opening the page. An estimated 3 billion land animals and wild and farmed fish are killed daily.
That count does not include hunting and trapping our natural predators and wildlife, the by-catch, and poaching of the last of our wild creatures to facilitate slaughter of the enslaved.’
‘You Know Who You Are’
End Animal Slaughter contributor Debbie Nelson spends a lot of time talking to people, including those in the animal industries. She’s had enough of their rationalisations.
We have an animal holocaust going on worldwide. Why do you deny it? I’m so sick or hearing your excuses!
I’m getting to know you all too well. I talk to you every day, those of you who farm and process animals and their products, and also those of you who consume them. I’m so tired hearing about your animal welfare standards. They mean nothing to the suffering of the animals subjected to this ‘humane’ care. From in-utero to death, from marketing to consumption, you are contributing to animal misery and anguish. We’re talking about billions of executions after a life of torture with no crime committed. Where precisely is your link in this chain of animal cruelty?
You know who you are. You are the veterinarians who work at the farms; small, factory and in-between. Your job is to keep the animals alive and walking in step only so they can be killed at a fraction of their natural lifespan. You keep compassionate, intelligent, emotional beings physically well enough until it is time to kill them to earn money for the farmers. You are just facilitating the terrible crime that keeps them in their prisons. Here’s one example: you help farmers keep their sows in gestation and farrowing crates by tending to the sores where their soft bodies rub against iron bars. How can you call yourself veteranians? You took a oath to protect animals and relieve their suffering, not perpetuate it.
You know who you are. You are the consumer of animal products. I hear you say so often ‘I love animals.’ ‘I can’t bear animal cruelty’, and yet you pay someone to kill animals so you can eat or wear them. Stop turning away from an inconvenient truth! Research the facts! Make no mistake, the blood is on your hands of those who give their lives for your cheese, milk, roast dinner, omelette. Farm animal brutality would not even exist without your ignorant or heartless use of your dollars. Stop sticking your head in the humane washing machine! It’s time you informed yourself. The power to do this resides with you and no-one else.
Jo Frederiks Art
You know who you are. You are the super-rich and powerful owners of companies that produce, process and sell animal products. You make millions from farm animal exploitation. They have none of the instruments of power you possess, and can’t speak for themselves. Even humans can’t fight you, they are also under your money-thumb. As long as your pockets are full what does it matter that billions of animals are killed every year? As long as your investors are happy, who cares about the rest?
What does it matter that dairy calves are taken away from their mothers just hours after birth? Who cares if dairy cows go to slaughter completely spent at 5 years old when their natural lifespan is close to 20 years? As long as you’re making money from them, what does it matter?
If a fetal calf is taken from his slaughtered mother and has all its blood drained out while still alive, then so be it. The huge Biotech community will reap the profits. If a piglet has its testicles cut out without pain relief so its meat tastes better, then so be it. The pork associations don’t care. If bouncing little male chicks in egg-laying hatcheries are ground up or suffocated within moments of hatching, then so be it. Who cares if they have never known the shelter of a maternal wing? If female chicks have their beak trimmed and some toes cut off to fit them for a life in a battery cage, then so be it. Who cares if they have the cognition of a toddler human? What does it matter to the Big Egg producers and the laying farms? They only care about the mighty dollar.
Let’s pause a moment to consider the often forgotten in animal farming – fish. In the ag-business of fish farming sentient, playful, social fish lead miserable lives, overcrowded in vats of filthy water laced with chemicals to keep them alive. They endure this horror only to be conscious while being killed. Their gills are cut and they are left to bleed to death in agony. Large fish are at times hit on the head with a bat and are often alive when cut open. But what does it matter? They are just fish.
They are just chickens.
They are just pigs.
They are just cows.
They are just animals.
Jo Frederiks Art
Shame on you if you own and run animal farms! Please don’t tell me you care for your animals. What you care for is efficiency, with an eye on the most dollars you can get from your products, alive and dead. You don’t sentence those you love to a life of misery and removal to a horrible death do you? Even those of you who allow your animals to live a comparatively decent life still send them away from their home and family, and some of you even put a bullet in their brain yourselves. You become their friends and care takers, then betray their affection when they can no longer earn their keep. Research! Think! When you do you will discover that consumers are leaving off the baby cow milk and cadaver meat in droves, and the future of farming is plant-based.
The penultimate link in the chain of production in the lives of farmed animals is transportation and slaughter. Hundreds of millions are transported in the US every year for breeding, fattening and slaughter. The industry calls it a “stage of production” referring to live beings as if they were tyres in an auto factory. Before being transported they have to endure herding and catching. Chicken catching is particularly stressful. Chicken catchers pursue and grab the birds, hold them upside down six to a fist, then slam them into transport crates. How would you like a electrical prod up the rectum and be moved into a totally unfamiliar place where you will have your throats slit? That’s what six month old piglets endure. They are supposed to live over 15 years. At a moment’s notice they must leave their homes and family to be placed in a crowded truck where they are transported in conditions that could be sweltering or freezing, deprived of food water and bedding for hours on end. Some animals experience such extreme stress that they die en route. Because of these horrible impacts on animals the issue of transportation has been addressed by federal, state and international bodies. The laws are clear but as is the case with so many rules in this industry, they are not enforced.
And now we come to the last link in the chain; slaughter, and the various euphemisms used to describe it. Call it ‘harvesting’, ‘processing’, ‘culling’ all you like, the fact remains that it is taking away the life of a helpless being against its will. Murder, execution, killing, homicide, slaying, massacre, butchery, carnage, bloodbath, annihilation, and destruction are all more truthful words to use. Why don’t you admit it? Call a spade a bloody spade, because that’s what it is.
Most people who read this will be at the consumer end of the production chain, and so my question is primarily for you. Are you ready to let it go yet, and transition to a vegan diet?
If not now, then when? If not you, then who?
Jo Frederiks Art
‘There’s no going back…’ The rise and rise of veganism.
In New Zealand as in many other parts of the western world veganism has gone, in just a handful of years, from Minority to Mainstream, from Ridicule to Revolution. Animal slaughter for food is coming to an end.
What other animals know
In this long, fascinating article by Ross Andersen of ‘The Atlantic’, we are taken on two journies; one to India to witness Jainism in action, the other to consider the origin of consciousness in animals. In his article Andersen writes about how fruit flies resort to alcohol in the form of fermented fruit when faced with dim mating prospects, crows use traffic on busy highways to open their walnuts, and fish speculate about the behaviour of other beings. The Jains have accorded other animals consciousness for nearly 3,000 years: scientific studies are beginning to show they are right.
Veganism: One Small Step for Man; One Giant Leap for Mankind.
End Animal Slaughter contributor Paul Stevenson reflects on the true meaning of veganism.
Sometimes people criticise vegans by accusing them of pretending to be better than others. I believe it is a great mistake for anyone to pretend that they are better than others, and it is a sure way to alienate them. However, my own life is immeasurably better now than it was before I became vegan because I now have the priceless joys of a clear conscience and peace in my heart.
It saddens me to think that a lot of people feel threatened by the word vegan, and I believe this reflects a misunderstanding of what being vegan means. Being vegan is primarily about living a kind and caring life by not harming others. Only by cherishing others, and the environment, can our lives ever hope to bloom. A vegan diet is merely a means to that end, not an end in itself, as some people appear to believe. It is not about losing anything; on the contrary, it is about gaining Life itself.
People everywhere dream of happiness and peace. However, they fail to realise their dreams because of the way they behave. Peace and happiness are the consequences of a peaceful and caring life. They are forever denied to those who inflict monstrous, and totally unnecessary, suffering on innocent creatures.
As a species we have taken the wrong track in life. Not only are we not realising our dreams but we are destroying ourselves in the pursuit of false pleasures. We have no need of animal foods and both our physical and emotional lives are vastly better without them. The greatest tragedy of all is that in our fruitless quest for pleasure we are causing unspeakable, unimaginably horrible suffering to multitudes of our fellow creatures. As we brutalise them we ourselves become brutes. The peaceful heart and the bloody hand do not inhabit the same body.
Last, but not least, we are not only destroying our humanity by our callous behaviour but the very environment on which we all depend. We must therefore make drastic changes while there is still time.
Parents who profess to care about their children are effectively stealing their future by the choices they make today. Their lifestyle is truly their children’s deathstyle. They are bequeathing them a wilderness. We must mend our ways without delay, or there will be no future for anyone. Adopting a vegan lifestyle would do much to turn this dire situation around.
If we truly care about our children we must begin caring about the environment and its inhabitants, upon which we all depend. The funny thing is that when we do begin to care we see through new eyes. We begin to appreciate this wonderful world for the first time. We realise how enormously privileged we are to have been born in the first place. When we begin to cherish our fellow companions, and treat them kindly and with respect, our heart softens and swells, and overflows with joy. We begin to see the world through their eyes, and our spirit tingles as never before. As our minds and hearts expand, sunlight floods into our lives and far horizons extend before us endlessly. In a very real sense, becoming vegan is ‘one small step for man, and one giant leap for mankind’.
Paul with two of his porcine companions, Tommy and Jimmy.
Review of ‘Mama’s Last Hug…’ by Frans de Waal
Read the New York Times review of Frans de Waal’s new book ‘Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions And What They Tell Us About Ourselves.’ Quote: ‘We deny the facts of evolution when we pretend that only humans think, feel and know. (‘Anthropodenial’). The title ‘Mama’s Last Hug’ refers to an amazing encounter between a dying chimpanzee and an old friend. (Video is embedded in the text)
.https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/25/books/review/frans-de-waal-mamas-last-hug.html
‘Stranger things have happened’…
In this opinion editorial Frank Greenall suggests we could be ‘laying off the animals’ any year now….
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/wanganui-chronicle/opinion/news/article.cfm?c_id=1503423&objectid=12203616&fbclid=IwAR1jl6UlUC7msV40bd8LDi9Hckpnw_Fd311FW-7qOIgWKC_IOb-KF–qT-k
SLAUGHTERHOUSE VIGIL, WHANGANUI, 24 FEBRUARY 2019
At our vigil outside Land Meats today I told Kirsty that I had managed to make some enemies here in Whanganui. “It’s not surprising though’, I said, ‘when you raise your head above the parapet you will get shot down.” Kirsty agreed and mentioned something about Tall Poppies. Mean-spiritedness is an unpleasant human trait. We often do not rejoice in other people’s success (or recognition) and would like to see them ‘taken down a peg or two’. At its extreme end it is ‘schadenfreude’ or feeling pleasure at another’s misfortune. If only we realised that we cannot harm others, even in thought, without harming ourselves.
Pure-faced sheep crowded into large trucks, await to be unloaded and killed.
We’re a callous, selfish, jealous, vindictive lot we humans, but fortunately that’s not all we are. We are also compassionate, caring, open, just, and selfless. My ability to read people has improved over the years and I tend to avoid contact with people who are overly negative, backbiting, selfish or otherwise ‘toxic’ to me, but some of the situations I get myself in mean I cannot avoid it.
I stuck my head above the parapet again at the vigil today, this time above the fence where the cows are herded before they are slaughtered. The groundsman who is always rude and aggressive and childish in his interactions with us can be seen at the back of the photo, taking a photo of me. I am not sure if I broke the law or not, and if I did I can expect to hear from someone in authority, I suppose. I don’t care. I just feel sick at the barbaric traffic in animal souls that goes on day in and day out in this city, in this country, all over the planet. Can this be the twenty first century, or are we still in the stone age? Why in the name of all that is good and true can we not see that this practice is abhorrant and unnecessary, and needs to stop now!
Can this be the twenty first century, or are we still in the stone age? Why in the name of all that is good and true can we not see that this practice is abhorrant and unnecessary? It needs to stop now!
We saw two trucks unloaded today. One was packed with pure-faced sheep going to the sheep slaughterhouse down the road, stopping at the cattle slaughterhouse briefly to unload a couple of cows, and the second truck was filled with mature cows. Standing way back, my singing sounded more like shouting, and I cannot see how it would have comforted them; however I noticed that when the cows were on the ramp a number of them looked over at me before descending. I was consciously sending them love and comfort, and at one point called out to them ‘I’m sorry, I love you, We’ll stop this, It’s alright.’ Of course it wasn’t all right. As I write this scores of sentient beings are huddled together in bleak pens, without food, their instincts telling them that a terrible thing is awaiting them. That terrible thing will happen to them first thing tomorrow morning when they will be shot in the head and have their neck sliced; every last one of these beautiful, gentle souls will die for your palate.
The groundsman started targeting me again as I took my photos, but Kirsty, she of the stentorian voice, came to my aid and frightened him off. 😊 When you have to stick your head above the parapet you cannot expect everyone to like you, but it’s better to have a few loyal friends than many who secretly wish you harm.
Some cows being unloaded stopped to look over to where I was standing. The hardest thing about doing vigils is knowing I can do nothing to save the animals.
Sandra Kyle
SLAUGHTERHOUSE VIGIL, 17 February 2019
Sandra Kyle and Kirsty Thompson do regular weekly vigils outside two slaughterhouses in Whanganui, New Zealand as part of the International Save Movement. To look for a vigil near you, or to start your own Save Movement group, go to thesavemovement.org
WE SAW an enormous black steer making a panicked attempt to climb over the top of a slaughtertruck today. He was probably standing on another steer, perhaps a downed one, but he couldn’t get over and fell back. Straddling the animals on the top tier was the truck driver. I had watched him for some moments beforehand electrically shocking the animals to try and get them off the truck. He was roughly jabbing them in short sharp movements, and it looked as if he was shocking the same animal several times. I was nearly choking with anger, and screamed out at him to stop electrocuting them. He didn’t react. He was also yelling at them and making movements with his arms: ‘Go! Get!’ or something similar. It took nearly ten minutes before the animals started to unload and during a lot of that time he was using his electric prod.
SEEING THAT STEER suddenly rise up out of the half-hidden, anonymous cargo, seeing his large ears, his open mouth and wild eyes, seeing his legs hanging over the side, has haunted me in the hours since. He could have hurt or bruised himself in the attempt also, and to suffer electric shocks and be yelled at, on top of that, set my heart beating faster with disbelief and anger. When I moved up closer to the truck. the groundsman told me to get off the pedestrian strip. I pointed out the symbol painted on the ground. He said ‘I don’t give a rat’s a*se, get the hell back.’ When I told Kirsty what he said she was furious and marched up to where I had been standing. He told her to move too, and then with a huge voice that boomed out of her small body she told him where to go. ‘We are ALLOWED to stand here….. This is not about YOU.’ He was quite taken aback, as usually Kirsty doesn’t say much. 
On the way home I congratulated her on her megaphone voice and she said she was so angry that he was throwing his weight around as usual.
THERE WERE MORE toots today, mostly positive but some negative too, probably as a result of the publicity this week. When we had just arrived someone passing us in a car veered towards me as if to run me down (he was just making a point). A car stopped over the other side of the road and I went across to talk to the two young women. ‘We want to become vegans too’ they said. Another two women on a motor scooter stopped and one said she only ate chicken, was that alright? Kirsty and I spoke to them for a while, then the pillion passenger started to get a bit aggro. ‘That’s just your opinion’, she said as they moved off.
EVERY TIME I APPROACH THESE HELL HOLES my heart sinks and then starts beating faster with anxiety and sorrow. It felt worse today, maybe because of the steer and the driver hurting the animals, but also because I am reading a book by Gail A Eisnitz called ‘Slaughterhouse’. Gail sent it to me to read ahead of my interviewing her on my Animal Rights radio and podcast show, ‘Safe and Sound’. I have copied an excerpt below that shows how cows are killed and processed in most western slaughterhouses. Gail’s investigations and sources proved that it often doesn’t happen according to plan and this could be for a number of reasons. Some of these reasons include a foreman pushing cows through at speed to increase profits, or because of dilapidated equipment, or poorly trained operators. Sometimes the animals are skinned while still alive. Don’t read on if you haven’t the stomach for it.
‘Cattle in a slaughterhouse are prodded along a chute to a ‘knocking box’.. The stun operator or ‘knocker’ shoots each animal in the forehead (they see it coming… my note) with a compressed air gun that drives a steel bolt into the cow’s skull and then retracts it. If the knocking gun is sufficiently powered, well maintained and properly used it knocks the cow unconscious or kills the animal on the spot.
The next man on the line ‘the shackler’ wraps a chain around one of the stunned cow’s hind legs. Once shackled the animal is automatically lifted onto a moving overhead rail. The cow, now hanging upside down by a leg, is sent to the ‘sticker’ – the worker who cuts the throat….. Next the cow travels along the ‘bleed rail’ and is given several minutes to bleed out. The carcass then proceeds to the ‘head skinners’, the ‘leggers’ (who chop off the legs, my note) and on down the line where it is completely skinned, eviscerated and split in half’.
IN MANY PLANTS it takes only minutes to turn a warm, breathing animal into a ‘split in half’ carcass. This is why Kirsty and I, and the SAVE groups in Wellington and Auckland and all over the world do vigils outside slaughterhouses. To say goodbye to the animals, to bear witness to their suffering, and to dig deep to find that power within us to continue working until we’ve put a stop to the carnage once and for all.
Sandra Kyle
When Old Age is a ‘Blessing not a Curse’.
Farmed animals are routinely sent to their deaths at a very young age, but what happens when they are allowed to grow old….?
‘Paying for Cruelty by the Pound’ by Lynley Tulloch
The shocking stabbing of a beloved miniature horse has shocked New Zealand, but our love of animals is selective and hypocritical, says End Animal Slaughter contributor Dr Lynley Tulloch.
