In this recent Guardian article author Sarah Marsh reports that more and more scientists and writers are acknowledging that changing to a vegan diet is necessary to mitigate carbon emissions. 

Read the article here

A bizarre (for some heartbreaking) photo and video of two separate incidents surfaced this week, delivering a grievous blow to the horseracing industry. The photo was of top Irish trainer Gordon Elliot sitting down on a newly dead horse while talking on the phone and giving the victory sign. The video showed Irish jockey Rob James climbing on the back of a dead horse and laughing as he pretended to ride it.   Both horses had been pushed until their hearts went into cardiac arrest, and would have experienced a painful and distressing death.  

Both trainer and jockey have been stood down from competing in Great Britain pending an enquiry, but whatever the outcome this has damaged the public perception of the industry.  Horseracing enjoys social licence largely because the public believes the horses are loved by their trainers, owners, riders and grooms, who treat them ‘better than their own children’, as is often said.   However the behaviour of this top trainer and jockey seems to tell another story. 

Read The Guardian article here

It’s time that Veterinary Surgeons’ food choices reflected the oath they take to relieve the suffering of all animals.  (Article by Karen Asp reprinted from sentientmedia.org)

Why Aren’t Vets Vegan?

Veterinarians work tirelessly to save the lives of animals, the majority working with companion animals. Day in and day out, they spend long hours caring for cats and dogs, other companion animals, too, often going to heroic measures to save them.

They have, after all, taken an oath created by the American Veterinary Medical Association. Part of it states: “Being admitted to the profession of veterinary medicine, I solemnly swear to use my scientific knowledge and skills for the benefit of society through the protection of animal health and welfare, the prevention and relief of animal suffering, the conservation of animal resources, the promotion of public health, and the advancement of medical knowledge.”

Yet for many veterinarians, their food choices do not reflect that oath, even though it does not specify companion animals. While they may not be consuming cats and dogs, they are most likely consuming other species like cows, chickens, and pigs. The irony, of course, is that these animals have the same wants and needs as the patients they treated that day. Call it speciesism, the mistaken belief that some species are more important than others, at its finest. 

Of course, speciesism is a societal issue, but when those who believe that eating some animals but saving others is okay are the ones who have pledged to protect animals, the disconnect is mind-boggling, and it is an issue vegan veterinary professionals are becoming more vocal about. “Why don’t more veterinarians ask why they’re eating their patients?” says Ernie Ward. D.V.M., a plant-based veterinarian in Calabash, N.C., and author of The Clean Pet Food Revolution, who went vegan first for his health and then animals because of the question he just asked. “Why aren’t more vets vegan or at least more opinionated about why it’s okay to do every lifesaving measure for certain species but not others?” Answering that question is not easy and will require a shift among veterinary schools and veterinarians.

How veterinary schools may be promoting speciesism

Veterinarians are no different than other individuals in that they grow up in a world and probably households where eating meat is normal. “They’re not any less immune to the deep-rooted cultural messages we’ve all grown up with,” says Diana Laverdure-Dunetz, M.S., founder of Plant-Powered Dog and a vegan canine nutritionist in Delray Beach, Fla.

Trouble is, though, when they enter veterinary school, those notions are often reinforced. “There is a certain culture that exists in veterinary schools,” Ward says. “Although many will deny this, it is a speciest approach.”

Ward describes how animals like cats, dogs, birds, and horses are categorized as near-human, which means they are regarded as having feelings and being able to feel pain. “From day one of veterinary school, you’re taught to treat these animals like they’re little humans,” he says.

Not so for other animals. In many schools, when veterinary students do their large animal rotation, learning about animals in the food production chain, the views shift. “The language changes and you’re discouraged from saying things like ‘this animal is suffering’,” he says, adding that peer pressure also makes it difficult to speak up. “Although these animals are just as brilliant and loving as companion animals, veterinary students are asked to blind themselves to their suffering and emotional needs.” 

That language shift is even more apparent when looking at some schools’ curriculums. At Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., for instance, two of its food tracks are labeled as food animals. “When you put animals in categories like this, it sends certain messages about how we view and value these animals, which translates into their care,” says Candace Croney, Ph.D., professor of animal behavior and well-being and director of the Center for Animal Welfare Science at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.

Language is not the only variable driving this speciest approach. Treatment of companion and food production animals also differs, especially when it comes to pain management. “Vet schools teach that if you can help mitigate pain, you can help the animal recover,” Ward says.

But “them” refers mainly to companion animals, and when Ward as a student questioned why they were not helping reduce the pain of injured food production animals, he was dismissed. Discussion about the pain these animals felt was shifted, and the redirect was shocking, his professors lamenting about how pain and suffering would decrease the animals’ ability to gain weight or grow. “It revolved around the economic, not the emotional, toll, and instead of discussing their pain, we focused on their economic value and how quickly they could grow or how you could slow disease,” he says. “It’s literally a type of brainwashing, as nobody would stand for a cat or dog having a gaping wound and not treating that animal.”

This is a tough lesson today’s veterinary students have to swallow. “Although we are never taught to provide a lower standard of care based on the species, the evolution of a bovine and canine, for instance, has been markedly influenced by humans—one was bred for companionship and protection and the other for food,” says Hannah DeZara, a vegan veterinary student in the class of 2023 at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colo., who does not believe her school is inherently speciest in its veterinary education “This notion of putting roles on species still exists today, and because of this, the way we decide their treatment plan is still in part dependent on the role they play in society, which is just a hard truth.”

The rise of animal welfare and ethics courses in schools

Some change is underfoot, though, as more veterinary schools are introducing animal welfare and ethics into their curriculum, some even offering classes in these topics. “Ten years ago, I would have said there are relatively few to very few colleges with even one course on animal welfare,” Croney says. “But when the AVMA oath came out, schools started putting more emphasis on animal welfare.”

All students at Colorado State, for instance, are required to take an animal welfare class, making it one of the only veterinary schools in the country to offer this as part of its core curriculum. Topics include everything from zoo animal welfare to foie gras production along with welfare being an essential aspect of a veterinarian’s obligations.

Yet classes do not have animal rights guest speakers or lectures dedicated to veganism, something DeZara does not believe veterinary schools bear a responsibility to teach. “Being a vegan or meat-eater does not make you a better veterinarian,” she says. But she does believe animal welfare, which dovetails with animal rights, should be an integral part of the education, which can then help veterinarians decide whether a plant-based diet is best for them.  

While animal welfare is one thing, animal ethics is another, and that is one topic schools are not addressing as well, something Croney hopes will change, as animal ethics drives her classes. “There is a subjective notion of what’s good and what’s less good so how do you determine what’s the right and wrong treatment of animals?” she says. “Science can answer many useful questions, but it can’t answer the questions challenging us today.”

Her classes explore major philosophies relating to the ethical treatment of animals, and veganism and speciesism are part of that discussion. Yet rather than teaching students to take a specific stance, she encourages them to examine issues objectively. “I don’t teach students what to think but how to think,” she says. For instance, when it comes to issues about eating animals, they examine why people eat meat, what the arguments are for eating and not eating animals, whether it is right to raise animals for food, whether animals feel pain, whether there are degrees of sentience, and whether it is ethically consistent to say you care about animals and their welfare and then eat them.

Teaching these topics is not easy, and they can often cause tension among the staff. “These issues come at the expense of things that are critically important to the practice of veterinary medicine, which is why some veterinary schools have limited or no dedicated coursework on these topics,” Croney says. These topics also challenge what many of the veterinary teaching staff have been taught, and many staff members become defensive when their long-held beliefs are questioned. 

Resistance is also real in the veterinary community. Just ask Richard Pitcairn, D.V.M., Ph.D., Arizona-based veterinarian and author of Dr. Pitcairn’s Complete Guide to Natural Health for Cats & Dogs, who hosts a yearly conference for veterinarians where all food is vegan. “Some will not attend anymore because of it,” he says. “Others, however, have changed their diet as a result.”

So should veterinarians be vegan?

While it is important to examine the role a veterinarians’ education may play in shaping his or her philosophies, there is an even more pressing question and that is whether veterinarians have a professional responsibility to be vegan. If they have sworn to protect animals, should they be eating animals when statistics show that 97 to 99 percent of the meat in the U.S. diet comes from factory farms where animals endure a lifetime of suffering?

This controversial question does not have an easy answer. “Because many veterinarians are employed in food animal production, that’s a tough sell, and I do not believe our oath requires this,” says Peter Soboroff, D.V.M., owner and director of New York Cat Hospital in New York City, who follows a pescatarian diet and acknowledges that food animal production is an ugly business. “Veterinarians are doing their best to ensure the health and well-being of those animals, but there is only so much you can say because these animals are still on their way to slaughter.”

Yet for some, the cognitive dissonance and disassociation is alarming, which is why Laverdure-Dunetz recently penned an open letter to veterinarians, asking them why they are not vegan. “I wanted to remind them of what I consider are their obligations not just to companion animals but all the animals they swore to protect,” she says.

Of course, diet is an individual choice, and nobody can tell anybody else what to eat, something Ward recognizes. But regardless of what they put on their plate, he wants veterinarians to be a louder voice for those who cannot speak, especially animals in factory farms. “It is our moral and professional responsibility to speak for all animals,” he says, adding that he has had veterinarians call him a quack because he is challenging the notion of killing animals for food. “These animals deserve to be treated compassionately and humanely, something most of the world agrees with, and in being better stewards of animal welfare, veterinarians should only condone the humane treatment of animals.”

The same goes when veterinarians are tasked with inspecting factory farms only to report that the animals are doing well. “Consumers are being sold this romantic vision of small family farms where animals are frolicking, but that’s disconnected from reality,” Ward says. “We are stuck with this legacy of food animal production that has morphed into this inhumane factory farming scheme, and that needs to change.”

If veterinarians continue to turn a blind eye to the abuse factory farmed animals suffer and not only support but also allow these practices to persist, they may be risking their credibility. “The public will wonder if they can trust veterinarians anymore,” Ward says.  

Instead, he suggests that veterinarians start asking questions like if animals feel pain, what the emotional ability of animals is, and how their welfare is being preserved, even how to make factory farming more humane. “If every vet can say they’re treating cows, pigs, and chickens the same way they’re treating cats and dogs—if every vet could say that every animal killed for food is treated just as compassionately as every dog and cat, we’ll have raised the bar of humane treatment to an astronomical level,” he says. And it is starting, given that a group of over 2,900 veterinary professionals and advocates recently petitioned the AVMA to prevent a brutal practice called ventilation shutdown on factory farms.  

It would also help if veterinary schools placed greater emphasis on animal welfare and animal rights. “If from day one veterinary schools took the approach that all animals feel pain, all animals have the capacity for emotions and all animals deserve the basic tenets of care, that would change the next generation of veterinarians,” Ward says.

In the end, becoming vegan still remains a personal decision, but it is one these experts hope veterinarians will consider. After all, as future veterinarian DeZara says, “A vegan lifestyle coincides with a lot of the values of veterinarians, and at the end of the day, we all just want to save animals while promoting animal health, public health, and welfare.”

In this article End Animal Slaughter Contributor Dr Lynley Tulloch remembers a newly hatched chick, and laments the cruel fate of industrially raised chickens the world over.

I have always had a special place in my heart for chickens. As a 14-year-old I was taken by a friend’s father for a trip through his poultry farm in Tuakau, situated in the North Island of New Zealand. That was about 40 years ago now, but it seems like yesterday. I was deeply shocked by the huge macerator which was presented as a killing machine for day-old chicks. As an animal lover I could barely believe what I was seeing and hearing, and my rescue instincts were instantly activated. Trailing behind my friend and her father I noticed a small late-hatching chicken on a tray among many empty egg shells. I asked what would happen to him or her and was told s/he would be killed.

Fifty percent of chickens born in a hatchery will die a frightening and painful death within 24 hours.  (Image source: Infovetdurgi.com)

Unwanted baby chicks travelling on a conveyor belt and dropping into whirling blades.  (Image source: Wikipedia)

Stuffing the baby chick under my jersey I took him home to this friend’s house where I was staying the weekend. Tentatively I showed her, suggesting we find some food for the chick. My friend betrayed me and told her father, who promptly took the chick outside and broke his neck. The legacy of that one chick is that I still carry him or her in my heart, and think of them on a regular basis. 

The current Code of Welfare for broiler (meat) chickens states that for chickens who require ’emergency humane destruction’ the following methods are applicable:

– Electrical stunning followed by neck dislocation and exsanguination

– Neck dislocation alone

– Gas, using a mixture of inert gases and carbon dioxide

– Immediate fragmentation/maceration for unhatched eggs and day-old chicks

So the great old maceration machine is still in action for ’emergency humane destruction’ of fragile day-old chicks who are not profitable and treated as ‘waste’. Welcome to the world little ones!

In some hatcheries one-day-old chicks, mainly males as they cannot produce eggs, are gassed as an alternative to maceration.   (Image source: kinderworld.org)

There are few more tragic animals on this planet than factory-farmed chickens. Whether bred for their meat (broiler chickens) or eggs, these chickens suffer immensely. For example, meat chickens are only between 32-42 days old when killed and processed, and they spend their entire lives in an artificial environment. They are bred to grow fast and will double in size every week. This often causes them to go lame and be unable to reach their food.   Many die of heart and/or organ failure even before slaughter weight.   From the very beginning to the very end, they live a tortuous life of suffering.

Many broiler chickens become lame, and some have organ failure, even before slaughter weight at 5 or 6 weeks old.  (Image Source: Direct Animal Action)

The vast majority of chickens bred for their meat in New Zealand and elsewhere live their entire lives in huge sheds. The sheds can be 150 metres long and 15 metres wide and hold up to 40,000 adult chickens. These hellish environments are maintained through artificial ventilation, lighting and temperature control.  If there’s a power cut, as there was a year ago in a huge chicken farm in West Auckland, tens of thousands of chickens can die of suffocation.

Bred to grow at a fast rate so they are more profitable for the farmer,  broiler hens have approximately the size of an A4 sheet of paper to live on. (Image Source: https://www.plantbasednews.org/)

The growth in production and consumption of chicken bodies since the 1980s is phenomenal.  Around 100 million are now raised and killed every year in New Zealand, while worldwide, the number tops fifty billion.  Recent news from the US is that the Biden Administration has officially withdrawn a pending rule by the previous administration that would have permanently allowed chicken slaughter lines to speed up from an already lightning-fast 140 birds per minute, to 175 per minute.  This is a small win for the chickens that barely got noticed, but then few people really notice these birds unless they are on their dinner plates.

The maceration machine killing method is known as ‘instantaneous fragmentation’. Basically, its like putting a wee chick in a blender and turning it on. It happens to all day-old male chicks in the laying hen industry on a daily basis. As you are reading this chicks are being thrown into industrial-size blenders so that people can have their eggs sunny side up.

The recommended ‘best practice’ for killing chickens as emergency humane destruction is as follows:

“Chickens should be humanely destroyed using a mixture of inert gases with a low concentration of carbon dioxide (i.e. up to 30%) to produce an atmosphere with less than 2% oxygen by volume.”

Does it sound humane to you?  To me it sounds like suffocation, which would be very painful and distressing to the chicks.

If a chicken bred for meat makes it through the first five to six weeks of life and ends up being slaughtered, it can expect a lot more distress. After the stress of being pursued by a ‘chicken catcher’ and stuffed into crates, birds are transported to the slaughterhouse where they are shackled onto an assembly line and hung upside down.  They then proceed to a water bath where an electrical current passes through their brain, intended to stun them.  Almost fully automated,  this is by no means a perfect process.  Mistakes and malfunctions occur.  I have seen videos of distressed birds entering the electric bath flapping their wings, and some are still flapping them when they exit the bath.    An ineffective stun means that the chickens will have their throats slit, and bleed out, while fully conscious. 

Birds can also be stunned in New Zealand with a mixture of inert gases plus up to 30% carbon dioxide to produce an atmosphere with less than 2% oxygen by volume. Birds undergoing this method gasp and flap their wings in distress.

These birds did not ask to be born. They were bred by humans with the sole intent of eating them and profiting from their bodies. It is a monstrous thing to do to animals.   Don’t be fooled by the SPCA ‘tick’ or the Free Range label. There is no humane way to raise and kill a bird in the industrialized systems of today.

For that little chick I failed to save forty years ago – please consider giving up eating chicken meat and eggs.

Lynley Tulloch is an academic, animal rights activist and writer. She has a PhD in sustainability education and ecocentric philosophy

Horse Racing is cruel to horses and must end,  writes End Animal Slaughter’s Sandra Kyle.

On my very first visit to a racetrack in the town I live in, a horse died in front of me.  Seven-year-old gelding Guy Fox had a horror fall when he collided with another horse during a Jumps race, and was euthanased on the spot because of his injuries.

Guy Fox, who was euthanased after a horror fall at Whanganui Racetrack in 2019. (Image Source: stuff.co.nz)

This was in 2019. Nineteen horses died on New Zealand horsetracks that year.  Australia, with many more race meetings than New Zealand, has on average one racehorse death every three days.  In the United States it is more like 10 every week.

An ‘equine athlete’ one moment; lying dead with a bullet in their head the next.  (Image Source : Coalition for the Protection of Racehorses)

If we read Steward Reports post-race we see that the horses die from ‘sudden cardiac events’.  They die from ‘pulmonary hemorrhage.’   They die from ‘head trauma’.   They die from shattered limbs, broken necks, crushed spines. However, the official figures do not tell the whole story of racetrack deaths. We do not know how many more are euthanased ‘back at the stables’ as a result of injuries that show up after the race.

Exercise-induced pulmonary haemorrhage occurs when a horse is galloped at full speed during a race.   About 90 percent of racehorses have lung bleeds after a race.  Photo Credit: © iStock.com / winhorse

All this is to be expected:  the result of putting 500kg animals with long, thin, easily-broken legs into a crowded field and belting them with a stinging whip to go faster, especially when they are tiring (which is when most of the whipping goes on).  Horses can feel a fly on their skin, and yet you often hear racing enthusiasts say ‘Oh, they hardly feel the whip!’ despite the Science that has proven to the contrary.   Jumps racing, including hurdles and steeplechase, is even harder on the horse than flat racing, and predictably leads to more injuries and deaths on the racetrack.

As if all this weren’t reason enough to ban horseracing, there are many other problems associated with this so-called ‘sport’.   Coalition for the Protection of Racehorses (CPR) states that when training, racehorses are kept isolated in stables for up to 22 hours a day, depending on the trainers.  They are not allowed to graze and are fed a high-energy protein diet where up to 90 percent of them suffer stomach ulcers.  Horses are a herd animal yet racehorses are prised away from their mothers at an early age and forced to live an unnatural life of isolation.  Sometimes they are only two years old when they start racing, even before their skeleton is fully strengthened, and they are pushed too hard, too far, and too often at the expense of their physical and psychological well-being and their natural instincts.   What’s more, to get to race meetings they often travel in floats for hours on end in stifling heat or bitter cold.  They undergo this treatment just so owners and trainers can get rich, and the public can ‘have a flutter’ by betting on their lives.

In New Zealand as elsewhere, horses are transported nationwide to compete in races.  (Photo credit, Sandra Kyle)

In October 2019 the ABC premiered a groundbreaking video exposing what happens to ex racehorses in Australia.  (Warning: Graphic Images)   It revealed how the vast majority of racehorses are brutally and violently slaughtered when they are no longer profitable.  The heartbreaking undercover footage, and the deliberate physical and verbal abuse of the slaughterers – ‘You’re going to die, you maggot!’ – shocked the world.   But the ABC ‘7:30’ report didn’t tell the whole sordid story about horseracing.  A year on from the ABC programme, Coalition For The Protection of Racehorses fills out the picture in this video.  (Warning: Graphic Images).

‘Wastage’ is a huge problem in this callous Industry.   Every year many more foals are bred by the thoroughbred racing industry than will make the final cut.  Recently CPR released a report demonstrating that over 3,000 horses a year ‘vanish’ from New Zealand. (Read the report here.)  In Australia it is estimated that only 300 of every 1,000 foals will ever start in a race because of unsuitability or temperamental reasons which means that in this country alone, approximately 9,000 will be considered useless and will end up at the knackery.

Will this beautiful being, photographed at a Whanganui race this week, also end up at the slaughterhouse if they show disappointing form?

(Photo Credit: Sandra Kyle)

There is nothing ‘sporting’ about the horseracing industry that involves bringing sentient beings into the world to suffer and die a painful and premature death.   This is 2021, and there are signs that public sensibility about horseracing is beginning to change – and change cannot come soon enough.  But there is no way to make horseracing OK, and it needs to be banned outright.

Coalition For The Protection Of Racehorses FAQ

In this article biologist, ethologist, behavioural ecologist and writer Professor Marc Bekoff discusses how ‘The Five Freedoms’ are just a nonsense when it comes to dairy cows and other animals raised for food, and the best thing we can do is leave animals and animal products out of our meal plans.

Read the Psychology Today article here

(Featured photo shows Caitlin Blake-Taylor of Taranaki Animal Save with a New Zealand dairy calf she recently rescued from slaughter)

Researcher, writer, teacher and animal activist Dr Michael Morris writes that what we do to chickens is one of the world’s worst injustices.

Main Points of the article:

Farmed chickens are genetic freaks, bred to be clinically obese and fast-growing.

 

A government report from 2006 found that in New Zealand 38 per cent of these Cobb and Ross chickens suffer from painful lameness.

 

Their hearts strain to pump blood through their bloated bodies, and this leads to heart attacks and abnormal fluid build-up. Up to 12 per cent of chickens collapse and die before reaching slaughter weight.

 

Any birds that survive until slaughter are scooped up and shipped to the slaughterhouse, where they face fresh torments, including shackling upside down by the legs. Researchers examining the pain receptors in the legs of broiler chickens conclude that shackling is a “very painful” procedure.

 

A combination of high line speeds, struggling chickens, and varying current means that stunning is missed in up to 60 per cent of cases.

Read the stuff.co.nz article here

Try veganism in January here