Category Archives: Animal abuse

Dog Meat Still on the Menu at South Korea Olympics

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A handful of South Korean restaurants near the venues of the Winter Olympics are defying a government push to take dog meat off menus for the duration of the games, Channel News Asia reported.

The opening ceremony takes place on Friday in Pyeongchang county, with athletes from over 90 countries and tens of thousands of tourists from  South Korea and abroad expected to flock to the region. In a bid to avoid controversy over the culinary customs of eating dog meat, local authorities have tried to curb the serving of canine delicacies by offering nearby restaurants subsidies to temporarily alter their menus.

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But only a small minority appear to have taken up the government on the offer, Pyeongchang County government official Lee Yong-bae told AFP.

“We’ve faced a lot of complaints from restaurant operators that we are threatening their livelihood,” he said. Of the 12 dog meat restaurants in the county, only two have complied, Lee said on Thursday. According to him, a handful entertained agreeing to scrap dog meat from the menu but have already seen a drop in sales.

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Puppies are seen in a cage at a dog meat market in Yulin, in China’s southern Guangxi region on June 21, 2017. China’s most notorious dog meat festival opened in Yulin on June 21, 2017, with butchers hacking slabs of canines and cooks frying the flesh following rumours that authorities would impose a ban this year. STR/AFP/Getty Images

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“Some of them initially shifted to selling pork or things instead of dog meat only to find their sales plunging sharply,” he said. “They then switched back to dog meat.”

Signage advertizing dog meat dishes has nonetheless become less prominent, as the restaurants are seeking to avoid giving “a bad impression to foreigners” during the Games, he added.

The custom of treating dogs as livestock and using them for sustenance is increasingly becoming a taboo in South Korea, with the country’s government branding them a “detestable” kind of meat. There are, however, no explicit legal punishments for the cooking of dog meat and a minority of South Koreans still do so.

Last year, authorities closed Moran market in Seongnam, the largest dog meat venue, which sold over  80,000 dogs a year. It accounted for about a third of South Korea’s dog meat consumption, according to local media estimates.

This article was first written by Newsweek

A woman’s anti-poaching journey across China

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http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1077348.shtml

 2017/11/27 11:30:50
Bodies of Siberian Weasels, often illegally poached for their fur Photo: CGTN

The bodies of dead animals are strewn around a cold, dark cellar. Disguised as the owner of a hotpot restaurant, animal rights activist Liu Yidan is collecting evidence of illegal wild animal trading in Anhui Province, eastern China.

Unaware of Yidan’s intent, the vendor boasts about her goods and offers to take the activist to a warehouse stocked with live snakes.

As the vendor lets down her guard, Yidan finds an excuse to get away. She calls the situation in, and returns with the forestry police. They later spend three hours counting the confiscated goods: Hundreds of frozen corpses, body parts and organs of endangered wild animals.

Since September 2016, Yidan and her team of volunteers have been engaged in an anti-poaching campaign. They’ve traveled to seven provinces, going undercover into farmers’ markets to collect evidence to help forestry police take action.

A baby Brown Wood Owl rescued by Yidan Photo: CGTN

With the leads from Yidan, the forestry police have also raided illegal warehouses and rescued live wildlife from illegal vendors. They have helped seize more than 10 tons of corpses and organs of endangered wild animals, some of which were Class I and II protected species.

Before the campaign, Yidan mostly lived and worked in Tianjin, a city in north China, to help preservation of wildlife birds. But to her, it wasn’t enough:

“I’ve seen many places where the wildlife population is decimated.”

“I can feel their (wild animals) pain. They never ask for a meal or a night of accommodation from us. They just live by themselves in the deep mountains. We have no reason to kill them.”

Mandarin Duck, Class II protected species in China Photo: CGTN

Environmental decay and illegal poaching have taken a heavy toll on China’s wildlife population. According to the World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) Living Planet Report, China’s terrestrial vertebrates have declined by half from 1970 to 2015. The report also points out that “habitat loss” and “nature degradation by human activities” are the most significant threats to biodiversity in China, while illegal hunting poses a significant threat to amphibians, reptiles and mammals.

Realizing the grave situation, China has taken steps to prevent further damage. Last year, the country committed to a historic ban of domestic ivory trade and revised its Wildlife Protection Law. Under the new law, wild animal poachers and smugglers face tougher punishments, and consumption of wildlife products is criminalized. Individuals and NGOs are encouraged to assist the authorities in wildlife preservation.
Carcass of a wild boar in the cold storage Photo: CGTN

The amended law provides essential legal support to Yidan’s work, but she still faces practical challenges. Working long hours in cold storage units has given her rheumatism. And every day, she’s harassed by poachers threatening to kill her. But Yidan is not intimidated.

“Although I’m physically tired, I feel delighted,” Yidan says. “When I see these [captured] birds and frogs return to nature, it feels like watching children return home to their mothers.”

NY Times Editorial: There’s a grim reality behind your Thanksgiving turkey

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Observing an annual pre-Thanksgiving rite, President Trump pardoned two big white fluffy turkeys Tuesday in a photo op at the White House. (Named Drumstick and Wishbone, the birds will end up at an enclosure on the campus of Virginia Tech.) That leaves 46 million other turkeys that won’t get pardoned. Instead, they’ll wind up on someone’s dinner table during this holiday season, a fate that is expected to befall about 245 million gobblers all told this year. And none of them will make the journey from farm to table via the Willard InterContinental Hotel, where Drumstick and Wishbone hung out before Drumstick was ceremoniously presented to Trump.

No animals raised on factory farms are kept and killed under worse conditions than turkeys and chickens, which make up most of the animals raised for food in the U.S. Nearly 9 billion chickens are slaughtered each year for food. And because poultry is exempt from the federal Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, which the U.S. Department of Agriculture enforces, there are not even minimum federal standards governing how they live or die.

Turkeys and so-called broiler chickens are genetically bred to grow fast (to satisfy our love for breast meat) and, typically, grow so big that they can barely walk by the time they are killed. As a result, they can suffer from painful skeletal disorders and leg deformities. The vast majority spend their short lives (about 47 days for chickens) in artificially lit, windowless, barren warehouse barns. So that turkeys won’t peck one another in these crowded barns, their beaks are painfully trimmed.

When it’s time to slaughter them, the live birds are shackled upside down on a conveyor belt, paralyzed by electrified water and then dragged over mechanical throat-cutting blades. The birds are supposed to be stunned unconscious by the electrified water, but that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes the birds miss the blades and end up tumbling into the tanks of scalding water, where they drown. These methods are so cruel that they would be prohibited by federal welfare laws — if the animals in question were cows or pigs.

These are the grim realities behind Americans’ traditional Thanksgiving meal. But there are ways to make life and death somewhat better for the turkeys that wind up on your table. Of course, we could all just eat less turkey and chicken, which would reduce the demand for these animals. But to make a bigger impact, the major buyers of chicken and turkey meat need to push their suppliers to adopt less grisly practices.

The Humane Society of the U.S. has launched a campaign to get producers to pledge to raise healthier, less bloated birds, to provide them with better living conditions — more space, more stimulating environments and more sunlight — and, perhaps most important, to render the birds unconscious before they are shackled and slaughtered. The campaign also seeks to persuade buyers to obtain meat only from producers that honor this pledge. Meanwhile, Temple Grandin, the animal science professor known for designing more humane procedures for slaughtering beef cattle, has called for “controlled atmosphere stunning,” a process of using gas to make the birds unconscious before they get shackled for slaughter.

Installing new procedures takes time and money. All the buyers and producers that have signed on to the Humane Society campaign have agreed to fully convert to a new system by 2024. Companies should be held to that time frame, and more should be encouraged to take that pledge. If enough consumers demand it, companies will do it. That’s not too much to ask for the sake of the bird you’ll be carving up on Thanksgiving.

ALMOST 50 PERCENT OF LOBSTER TRAPS LOST, MISPLACED DURING IRMA

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[…no mention of the fact that the lost traps will keep catching lobsters until they’re stuffed full…]

http://www.flkeysnews.com/news/local/article182028936.html

BY KATIE ATKINS

NOVEMBER 01, 2017 9:30 AM

Just like on land, damage caused by Hurricane Irma varied throughout the waters surrounding the Florida Keys and one of Monroe County’s most profitable industries: Commercial fishing.

The Category 4 hurricane on Sept. 10 delivered a blow to the Keys spiny lobster harvest about a month into the most economically important season for the commercial fleet.

Billy Kelly, executive director of the Florida Keys Commercial Fishermen’s Association, said on the bayside, lobster traps moved an average of 3.5 to 5 miles during the storm. On the oceanside, traps moved 8 to 15 miles on average and the greatest movement of a trap was 18 miles, from Key Largo to southwest Matecumbe Key.

Initial estimates show 43 percent of the 350,000 lobster traps in Monroe County waters were lost or displaced, he said, adding about 17,500 have been recovered. The Middle Keys took the hardest hit with about 80 percent of traps lost or misplaced.

“As soon as guys had recovered their personal lives, they were able to get out there and on Oct. 6, the stone crab season kicked in,” he said.

 They deployed stone crab gear with the first pull on Oct. 15 and were looking for displaced lobster traps at the same time, he said.

Production for stone crab season, which runs through May 15, is expected to be fair, Kelly said. The lobster season ends March 31.

“Lobster season’s not totally over. There are lobster to be caught, but you have to be geared up for it,” said James Platt of Marathon. He owns both a charter business, No Slack Sportfishing, and a commercial fishing business, Marathon Crab and Lobster Co., and said both sides of the business have taken a hit. Thankfully, the majority of his traps are for stone crabs.

“But some of my friends that have a lot of lobster traps have lost as many as 75 percent of traps or more. Some were able to recover a few and build a few new ones and some of the guys fishing in deeper water are actually doing pretty well,” he said.

Still, the yield for spiny lobster this year is going to be down considerably, Kelly said.

“You can still go to the fish market and get them at a good price, we just won’t have as many as we caught last year,” he said.

Crab claws rank second only to spiny lobster in importance to the Florida Keys commercial fishing industry. All 1,071,544 commercial stone-crab traps in Florida, a number limited by state law, require a state-issued tag.

18-year-old delivery driver charged with hitting, killing geese

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http://wset.com/news/local/vdgif-18-year-old-delivery-driver-charged-with-hitting-killing-geese

by Catherine Doss

Friday, October 27th 2017

Canada Geese 4email.jpg

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COLONIAL HEIGHTS, Va. (WSET) – An 18-year-old Jimmy John’s delivery driver has been charged after he hit a gaggle of geese in Colonial Heights, according to the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries.

DGIF officials say the incident took place along Roslyn Road on October 24.

They say Roberto Pietri drove through a gaggle of geese, killing two of them.

VDGIF says Pietri was charged on October 25, after a concerned citizen brought the incident to the department’t attention.

He’s facing three misdemeanor charges: driving with a revoked license, unlawfully hunting and killing a wild animal, and killing migratory game bird in violation of board regulations.

A DGIF spokesperson told WTVR this appeared to be an accident and that Pietri was “unable to stop.”

Please Speak up for NY Mute Swans!

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The NY DEC has released its revised draft state management plan for mute swans and claims to have made significant changes in response to public comments received over the past three years. But what hasn’t changed is its attitude toward mute swans-DEC will stop at nothing to blame mute swans for damage to the environment, and other species so they can be hammered to appeal to hunters, anglers and jet skiers, which the DEC treats as clients. Tell DEC you want mute swans protected from egg molestation, and you don’t want adult or baby swans removed, killed or otherwise harmed. They are neither overpopulated, nor in need of DEC’s control or hostility.

Friends of Animals will be at the Oct. 19th public hearing in New Paltz, so please join us there. We encourage you to attend one of three public hearings to oppose this new plan and to tell the NY DEC to keep its hands of New York’s mute swans.

Hearings will be held at the following dates and locations:

Tuesday, September 19, 2017 at 6 p.m.
Suffolk County Water Authority
260 Motor Parkway
Hauppauge, New York 11788

Tuesday, October 3, 2017 at 6 p.m.
Braddock Bay Pavilion
199 E. Manitou Road
Hilton, NY 14468

Thursday, October 19, 2017 at 6 p.m.
Region 3 NYSDEC
21 South Putt Corners Road
New Paltz, NY 12561

In addition, please now submit written comments on the revised management plan by writing to: Bureau of Wildlife – Mute Swan Plan, 625 Broadway, Albany, NY 12233-4754; or e-mailing Wildlife@dec.ny.gov (subject line – “Mute Swan Plan”). The public comment period will close on Dec. 6, 2017.

DAMN DAIRY

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http://www.upc-online.org/alerts/170911_damn_dairy.html#.WbwQ0bsBpic.facebook

 by Karen Davis, PhD

This article derives from an impromptu comment I posted on September 8, 2017 following an article in Animals 24-7:“What is ‘the dairy industry’?”

A calf being licked by her mother.

All I ever had to see of the dairy industry to hate it were images of calves torn from their mothers to be isolated, tremblingly, in solitary crates and hutches. All I ever had to hear were the mothers crying for their stolen newborns. This is not just big dairy operations; it is dairy farming. I remember back in the 1970s being taken by a friend to a small dairy farm in Pennsylvania and seeing the cows and the mud and the cement milking “parlor” and the milking machinery. That was my first glimpse of a bizarre and sickening business considered by everyone I grew up with as “normal.” In fact, it wasn’t “considered” at all.

Whenever possible, I post comments to food section articles in The Washington Post and elsewhere pushing back against claims that the mammary milk stolen from mother cows and goats is “necessary” for human calcium; in reality, interspecies mammary milk is not even digestible by the majority of the human population. Even if it were, the business would be what it is, ugly. Despite the machinery, packaging and other things between themselves and the cow or goat, consumers of mammary-gland products are essentially sucking the nipples of a nursing mother robbed of her baby and her baby’s birthright.

I’m one of those people who never realized for the longest time that in order to produce milk, a cow, like all mammals, has to be pregnant. Reading “The Cookbook for People Who Love Animals” in 1983 turned on a light bulb in my brain. That cookbook described how dairy cows have been genetically manipulated to produce such an unnatural amount of milk for human consumption that their udders drag on the milking parlor floor and workers tramp on those swollen, dragging udders without a thought.

The cows, meanwhile, are drained of the calcium they need for their own bones, which are being depleted in order to produce milk for cheese pizzas and anything else it can be poured into for profit. Like hens manipulated for excessive egg shell production, dairy cows develop osteoporosis and painful lameness. They develop mastitis, a painful infection in their udders that leaks pus into their milk. A man who grew up on a family dairy farm in Maryland once told me that they sometimes inserted large antibiotic syringes directly into the cow’s udders to treat the infection.

The bodies of dairy cows are disproportioned by the weight and drag of their abnormal udders, and the cows have to be gotten rid of as soon as they no longer pay their way. Like hens bred for egg production, the cows’ bodies are mere envelopes for their ovaries; after that, they’re done with.

In her book Slaughterhouse, Gail Eisnitz writes that every hamburger contains about 100 “spent” dairy cows. Think about that the next time you pass by the wormy messes in the meat display counter.

Book cover: Slaughterhouse

Slaughterhouse was first published in 1997. Twenty years ago, Gail Eisnitz bore witness to events that are the same today as they were then: Your worst nightmares are “normal agricultural practices.” (See my review of Slaughterhouse.)

Articles I’ve read in agribusiness publications about cows, chickens, turkeys, pigs and other farmed animals being locked in a building in which a fire broke out, quote the “humane” family farmer: “At least no one got hurt.” I recall an article about a small dairy farm’s cows – those who did not die in the barn fire but were suffering badly from smoke inhalation – being held without help on the farm until the auction truck came to take them away.

Farmers are not sentimental about “their” animals, and this is a source of pride with them. Yet they have no problem creating smarmy, cloyingly sentimental and dishonest ads on TV and elsewhere about their “wholesome” enterprise and their “humane” animal care – anything to anesthetize the public. Each time I see one of these “dairy pure” types of ads with a farmer holding an inert newborn calf (just taken away from his or her mother), I want to puke and weep with sadness and disgust.

I want all forms of animal agribusiness to be abolished forever asap. I support whatever will make that happen. I will never stop working for an animal-free food supply and for animals themselves until I die trying.

Karen Davis, PhD, President, United Poultry Concerns

Five detained after 300 tonnes of dead pigs dumped in east China

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http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2017-09/11/c_136600302.htm

Source: Xinhua| 2017-09-11 12:28:44|Editor: Song Lifang
 

HANGZHOU, Sept. 11 (Xinhua) — Five people have been detained on suspicion of dumping 300 tonnes of diseased pigs in a mountainous area of Huzhou city, eastern China’s Zhejiang Province.

The city government issued a circular Monday accusing the Huzhou Industrial and Medical Waste Treatment Company of sending pigs that died of disease to a landfill rather than for cremation between 2013 and 2014.

Police investigation shows that the company, which is responsible for disposing the city’s dead pigs, has a refrigerated storage facility with a capacity of 50 tonnes. For six times, the company dumped diseased carcasses at three sites at Dayin Mountain whenever the facility was full.

Over the last week, the Huzhou government had dug out 224 tonnes of decomposed carcasses and sludge, which will be cremated.

A sample-test report by the municipal agricultural department said that no human-infecting pig diseases, such as H5 and H7 bird flu viruses and foot-and-mouth disease, had been found.

The authorities have ordered that the public security bureau, agriculture and environmental department and the local government to collectively ensure no carcasses are left in the soil. Later, local environmental service center will carry out an environment impact assessment.

The Zhejiang provincial government has sent inspectors to oversee the treatment process.

East China provinces are known for breeding pigs, and there are rules for disposing of carcasses. However, illegal dumping occasionally occurs when dealers try to save on bio-safety costs.

Can you be vegan and eat your placenta?

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This misses the main point of veganism–ending animal cruelty and exploitation. Bringing a new human baby into the already overcrowded world is one of the most anthropocentric acts a person can do. So no, whether the afterbirth is eaten or not, birthing yet another human baby should not be considered an animal rights/vegan thing to do. IMHO, anyway.

 

http://metro.co.uk/2017/08/31/can-you-be-vegan-and-eat-your-placenta-6891872/
“Vegans are having it out in a Facebook group about a woman who ate
her placenta.
“Hannah Ayhens, who recently had a baby, posted a photo of her freshly
birthed, bloody and veiny organ served on a beautiful glass dish with
flower decorations, in the group called ‘What Broke Vegan Eat’, which
has more than 80,000 members.
“The placenta, or afterbirth, forms after conception, and connects
mother and baby in the uterus. It grows throughout pregnancy,
delivering oxygen, nutrients, and hormones to the baby and taking away
waste. Women ‘give birth’ to it if they deliver their baby vaginally,
or it’s removed through the incision if they delivery via C-section.
“Eating the placenta can be done in many forms – in smoothies, pills,
fried with onions or even eaten raw and immediately after birth. It is
uncommon (although it’s popular in celebrity circles. Kourtney
Kardashian did it), but it happens, and many believe it is the best
thing a new mother can eat.”