Safe and Sound with our guest Angela Glover

The Kingdom of Tonga has no permanent vets and depends on the visits of SPAW (South Pacific Animal Welfare) to get their dogs and cats de-sexed and treated.

In the two years UK national Angela Glover has been living in Tonga she has noticed the enormous difference SPAW are making. Consisting of volunteer New Zealand veterinary personnel who travel at their own expense, they help out the island’s animals and raise awareness of animal welfare in Tonga and other parts of the Pacific.

But the need is great. There are around 20,000 stray dogs in Tonga alone. Charley was one. Starving, suffering from a brain tumour, Angela and her partner adopted him and gave him a loving home until his peaceful death this past June. They have set up ‘Charley’s Fund’ to raise money for the work SPAW are doing in Tonga. Listen to the interview with Angela here:

Safe and Sound Podcast with our guest Christian Huriwai

In this week’s Safe and Sound, activist and three-time world champion unicyclist Christian Huriwai talks about his background, and passion for animals. As a child he saw decapitated roosters running around and this turned him vegetarian.

Later, after watching ‘Earthlings’ he became vegan. Chris discusses his public challenge to Fonterra over the Milk for Schools project, believes the time has come to sit down with farmers. Christian also talks about his future plans to help more Maori adopt a plant-based diet.

 

 

 

 

lamb of god

The Silence of the Lambs

The late musician and performer Prince famously said:  “We will need an Animal Rights Day when all slaughterhouses shut down”.  A long-term vegan and committed animal advocate, the singer/songwriter was trailblaizing not only in his music but also in his animal advocacy.  As he wrote in his song ‘The Animal Kingdom’:

No member of the animal kingdom ever did a thing to me
It’s why I don’t eat red meat or white fish
Don’t give me no blue cheese
We’re all members of the animal kingdom
Leave your brothers and sisters in the sea.

Prince inferred there would be great rejoicing when all slaughterhouses close for good.  Maybe as a visionary artist he could ‘see’ a future where the blood of tens of billions of innocents are no longer spilled every year.   Imagining a world without such mind-numbing violence and injustice, working to making it come about, is what this website is about.   Personally speaking,  I expect to see it to happen in the western world within ten years.  That’s the goal!

The meat industry, in order to get consumers to buy their products, has to keep the horrors of its workings hidden.   Animals suffer at every stage of their final journey to the slaughterhouse.   In order not to have feces everywhere during processing, animals are forced to fast for up to 48 hours before they go on the slaughter truck.  They are therefore hungry even when they board the vehicle that carries them to their death. On the truck, which can cover long distances in weather extremes  – animals can collapse with the heat, or literally ‘freeze’ to the sides of the trucks in subzero temperatures – they are also banned from drinking water.    I have videoed animals parked up for more than ten minutes on a swelteringly hot day in a metal vehicle, stamping their feet in distress, panting and sweating with the heat, while the driver was off getting his lunch.

When they arrive at the slaughterhouse the animals have to wait their turn.    In the facility near where I live cattle arriving on Sunday have to wait 24 hours until work resumes again on Monday.  While they are waiting they watch their peers disappearing one by one.    Please do not tell me that they do not sense something is terribly wrong, and do not fear what is going to happen to them.

No animal walks willingly to his or her death.  The self-preserving instinct they share with all other life-forms means they would strongly resist having their throats slit, so Industry manages this by stunning them first.    The way this is done varies. Pigs are commonly placed in a C02 chamber where they spend more than a minute screaming and trying to escape while the gas burns their throat and nasal passages.  Hens and chickens are passed upside down in a bath of electrified water, and cows have their skulls drilled with a special gun that places a retractable bullet into their brains.  After they are stunned they are hung upside down, which in heavy cows and pigs can cause tears and breaks.  Being upside down they can bleed out more quickly, which is more commercially beneficial – ‘Time is Money’. Depending on the slaughterhouse, it is not uncommon to have some animals survive one stage, or even two stages of the slaughter process.  These animals die, as slaughterhouse worker Ramon told the Washington Post: ‘piece by piece’.  The failure rate, however, is impossible to evaluate.

In so-called ritual slaughter, for halal and kosher meat, animals are not stunned at all, causing the animal to feel the agony and panic of having their throat slit and being bled out.

While slaughterhouses are places of sheer horror for the animals, what about the people who carry out the killing?  The correlation between violence and animal slaughter has long preoccupied social scientists.  If a worker has to cut the throat of 100, 200, 300 animals a day, then it follows that this will affect him negatively.   Very few people want to do this work for obvious reasons, and so it is those who have no other choice, such as poor migrant workers, who carry it out.   This takes a very heavy toll on their psyche.    In this example, as in so many others, the poor are disadvantaged.

This past week at my vigil here in Whanganui, Aotearoa/New Zealand, I videoed some lambs on a truck waiting to be let through the electronic gate leading to the slaughterhouse.  As I have seen so many times before over my years of bearing witness, I saw fear, uncertainty and confusion in their eyes.  These babies pressed against each other for comfort, and some turned their heads to look at me, but in generally they stood still.  I heard not even a faint bleat from them.  All I heard was silence.

The fear and pain we put other sentient beings through on a mind-bending scale has to come to an end.   It is time to begin the work of closing down slaughterhouses for good.  These places of horror and injustice are an appalling crime against the helpless innocent, and a terrible blight on our humanity and so-called ‘civilisation’.

We do not have to eat animals.  As has been well documented for decades now, not eating animals makes people healthier, and it is also much better for the planet.   With so many delicious vegan alternatives available, we don’t have to go without by giving up eating animals and their products.    If you eat meat and dairy, if you are one of the causes for the existence of slaughterhouses, then please consider transitioning to a vegan diet.   If you will not to do this, then the least you can do before you put your fork to your mouth is to take a moment to think of the bloody way your food got onto your plate.

Please help to create a non-violent world by refusing to be a cause for slaughterhouses to exist.  Please be part of the change.   Please begin now.

Safe and Sound Podcast – this weeks guest Roz Holland

Roz HollandVeterinary surgeon and SAFE Veterinary Science advisor Roz Holland is this week’s Safe and Sound guest. Since graduating as a vet in 2006, Roz has spent most of her career overseas working in a mix of general practice, emergency, and welfare work – predominantly companion animal de-sexing programs. Roz went vegan on her own five years ago after rationally approaching welfare issues on a harm minimization basis. She had never met another vegan at that time.

Listen to Roz talk about the life of a chicken in factory farms. Chickens raised for meat suffer hock burns, foot burns, lameness, fluid retention, and metabolic disease resulting in suffocation and heart failure. Layer hens become aggressive because of their chronic frustration and boredom in their relentlessly sterile and cramped conditions. Hear about broiler ‘parent’ birds being deliberately kept hungry, and how the business of supplying chicken is a monopoly that has the farmer trapped as well as the birds. What about the term ‘free range’? What does it actually mean when it comes to chicken production?

Roz also talks about the intelligence, sentience, and factory farming of fish.

Safe and Sound Podcast with our guest Damien Oehlrich

Safe and Sound’s guest this week is gifted vegan chef Damian Oehlrich, who has just opened Whanganui’s first vegan restaurant. He talks with Sandra Kyle about his love for food and hospitality, the benefits of a vegan diet, and his desire to turn New Zealanders into healthy eaters.

Safe and Sound Podcast with our guest Shanti Aluwalia

Why might the coalition want to keep Jacinda away from animal welfare? What is a farmer and ex rodeo participant doing in charge of animal welfare in this country? How does ‘gatekeeping’ in Parliament stand in the way of animal welfare progress? How is it that Codes of Welfare end up protecting farmers instead of animals under The Animal Welfare Act? Why does it make good economic sense to move away from factory farming?
What can we do to hold the government to account about breaking promises on animal welfare?

Safe and Sound’s guest this week, Shanti Ahluwalia answers these questions and more. Shanti worked for several years as policy advisor for SAFE, and shares some of his insights with us about the workings of government.

His advice is for activists and animal lovers to write to the Prime Minister and request her government honour its promise to appoint a separate, entirely independent, Minister for Animals.

What You Can Do:
Write a short email to Jacinda.Adern@parliament.govt.nz asking for a separate Minister for Animals.

Safe and Sound Podcast with our guest Sam Tucker

From being New Zealand’s youngest-ever broadcaster (at FreeFM in Hamilton) to managing programs for Vegan Outreach in Australia and New Zealand, Sam Tucker has been a significant voice against animal cruelty and for veganism for more than a decade. And he’s still just in his early twenties!

Listen to the boy from rural Waikato’s story, and his work for Vegan Outreach