Editor’s note: The opinions in this article are the author’s, as published by our content partner, and do not necessarily represent the views of MSN or Microsoft.
As Russian forces continue to fail at the goal of bringing Ukraine under Russia’s control, and Finland and Sweden have intensified their talk about joining NATO, Vladimir Putin’s propensity to threaten nuclear escalation has increased proportionately. This threat appears to be Putin’s way of guaranteeing that the United States and NATO keep their distance while his military destroys an independent neighboring country. Though the threat is real, it may be starting to lose its desired effect.
AChinese official in the United States has shared with Newsweek a warning from Beijing against other countries fostering contacts with rival Taiwan, after Ukraine’s parliament expressed gratitude for the self-ruling island’s support in the ongoing war with Russia.
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AP Explains: US, allies protesting Russia at G-20Unmute
The message from Kyivcame in the form of a poston the Verkhovna Rada’s official Telegram account, where the legislative body shared an image Monday of a “die-in” demonstration recently held in the capital Taipei, stating that, “from the first days of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine has been supported by distant Taiwan.”
“The struggle for the future of Ukraine continues, and we are grateful for the support from around the world!” the message continued. “The world is with us, because…
North of Flagstaff, Arizona, where the Tunnel Fire has been scorching through communities after sparking on Sunday, about 750 homes have been evacuated. The Tunnel Fire has burned through 20,000 acres so far and is 0% contained.
A HEN, hooked up to electrodes, stands alone in a glass cage. She starts panting, thrashing, slumping over, and lunging at the enclosure’s walls, appearing to look for an escape. Outside the cage, researchers point, take notes, and watch her die.
These scenes, which took place at North Carolina State University, were documented in 10 hours of video footage recently obtained via public records requests by the organization Animal Outlook and shared with The Intercept. The experiments were funded by the U.S. Poultry and Egg Association, a major industry trade group, and took place in the wake of the 2015 outbreak of an aggressive bird flu that resulted in the culling of about 50 million farmed birds — not all of them necessarily infected — across the United States. The researchers were testing what was then a relatively new set of disease control methods: known as “ventilation shutdown,” the process kills the animals through heatstroke and suffocation, similar to dying in a hot car. According to Will Lowrey, the Animal Outlook attorney who obtained the videos, “the suffering is extremely profound.”
In 2020, Iowa Select Farms, the state’s largest pork producer, killed healthy pigs, who could not be slaughtered for food due to Covid-induced slaughterhouse closures, by sealing off the airways and pumping in heat: a practice called “ventilation shutdown plus.” In a groundbreaking undercover investigation covered by The Intercept, the animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere revealed pigs screaming in distress for hours as they, essentially, roasted to death. Soon after, Iowa Select announced that it was discontinuing its use of the method, commonly abbreviated as VSD+. New documents obtained through federal and state public records requests reveal that, far from being an aberration, the meat industry’s use of this gruesome method is still on the rise — and it’s being abetted by government and organized veterinary medicine.
Now, another strain of highly pathogenic avian influenza, or HPAI, is tearing through the country. More than 27 million chickens, turkeys, and other birds have been killed or scheduled to be killed — or “depopulated,” in meat industry jargon — since February. Many of these animals were killed with ventilation shutdown plus. In Iowa, the nation’s top egg-producing state, 5.3 million hens at a Rembrandt Enterprises egg factory farm were exterminated with VSD+ last month, the Storm Lake Times reported. (Asked to confirm this report, Chloe Carson, communications director for Iowa’s agriculture department, told The Intercept that she could not disclose the method and denied specifying it to the newspaper, though the story says she confirmed it was the method used. Tom Cullen, the story’s author, said he stands by his reporting and that he’d spoken to local personnel and former company employees with knowledge of the method. When contacted by The Intercept, Sheila Hagen, Rembrandt’s vice president of HR and legal, immediately hung up.)
Ventilation shutdown plus was also used in February at two chicken and turkey facilities in Kentucky, according to records from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, or APHIS, which oversees management of farm animal disease outbreaks. In Minnesota, more than 1.7 million birds, mostly turkeys, have been or will soon be depopulated since the state’s first avian flu case on March 25, with an increasing number killed using VSD+ compared to the 2015 bird flu, according to state veterinarian Beth Thompson. In public records first released to Lowrey, requests to use the method have also appeared in Wisconsin and Missouri. The USDA financially compensates meat producers for these killings.
The videos obtained from NC State are remarkable because the meat industry often claims that undercover footage of cruel conditions taken by activists is doctored or staged. But these videos came directly from an industry-funded study, the raw footage of which was shared with The Intercept.
The research tested multiple versions of VSD: ventilation shutdown alone, which entails sealing off airflow to the birds’ cages, causing their body temperatures to rise to lethal levels; ventilation shutdown with additional heat, which speeds the process of killing them via heatstroke; and ventilation shutdown with carbon dioxide, which deprives the chickens’ bodies of oxygen. VSD with the addition of either or both of these is referred to as “VSD+.”
The hens took more than 91 minutes to die from ventilation shutdown alone, 54 minutes to die from VSD with supplemental heat, and 11.5 minutes to die from VSD with carbon dioxide, according to a 2017 final report based on the research that was submitted to the U.S. Poultry and Egg Association. According to a separate study published the following year by some of the same researchers, time to death is significantly longer for hens in a large, multilevel cage setting, which more closely resembles factory farm conditions than individual cages: 3.75 hours for VSD alone, 2 hours for VSD plus heat, and 1.5 hours for VSD plus carbon dioxide.
In some news reports on the current avian flu, sources have said that exterminating birds is more humane than letting them die of the disease. And HPAI is undoubtedly a terrible illness. “Many birds die suddenly, with mortality rates as high as 100% within a few days, though it can also take weeks. The dying birds likely suffer enormously as they struggle to breathe, develop diarrhea, and become paralyzed or otherwise neurologically compromised,” Gwendolen Reyes-Illg, a veterinary adviser to the Animal Welfare Institute, told The Intercept in an email.
In their 2015 funding proposal — asking the U.S. Poultry and Egg Association for $110,075 to support the experiments — the NC State researchers wrote, “The objective is to examine the humane aspects and effectiveness of ventilation shut down (VSD) for depopulating laying hens in cage systems,” but “humane” is not defined in the proposal. “However unpleasant, it should be a primary goal that depopulation (euthanasia) methods strive to meet these standards within the context of the extreme need scale in which VSD would be used.”
Other common methods of killing poultry birds — carbon dioxide poisoning and suffocation with firefighting foam — are not as effective on birds used in egg production as on those in meat production, the proposal says. Egg-laying hens in factory farms are typically kept in cramped, vertically stacked battery cages, while chickens raised for meat are packed together on the floor.
Although the test conditions shown in the footage — individual hens killed inside plexiglass cubes — aren’t the same environment as a factory farm, the videos suggest the degree of panic and suffering birds experience when they’re killed with VSD.
“These are birds in extreme distress,” said Sherstin Rosenberg, a veterinarian who has cared for thousands of chickens and other poultry birds at an animal sanctuary in California, after reviewing the NC State footage. “They are literally fighting for their lives, they’re gasping for air, they’re struggling.” The videos don’t have any audio, but Rosenberg added: “These birds look like they’re vocalizing to me. I think they were probably crying out.”
In the global scientific community, she said, “it’s generally accepted that, if one could assume that a procedure would cause pain or distress to a human, you can also assume it would do the same for an animal.”
Birds used in agricultural research get no protection under federal welfare laws. “The Animal Welfare Act, in the very definition of animals, excludes a number of types of animals used in laboratory experiments. These animals include rats, mice, and birds bred for research, as well as agricultural animals used for agricultural research,” said Jeremy Beckham, research advocacy coordinator for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. The agricultural exemption, he added, is “specifically [because] there are things done commonly to animals in an agricultural context that would be violations of the law if they were done to other research animals.”
The names of the researchers were redacted from public records obtained by Animal Outlook. But the 2017 final report lists the lead investigator as Kenneth Anderson, a professor in NC State’s Prestage Department of Poultry Science. Listed as co-investigators were professors Kimberly Livingston, Sanjay Shah, and Mike Martin, who is now North Carolina’s state veterinarian. Wallace Berry of Auburn University is listed as a collaborator. At NC State, the Prestage Department of Poultry Science advertises its “strong industry ties” and is named for the Prestage family, the owners of Prestage Farms, a poultry and pork company headquartered in North Carolina.
“If you keep a house full of infected birds, and the pathogens spread through the ventilation air, soon you have many more farms infected. So rapid depopulation is vital,” Shah wrote in an email to The Intercept. “If you just turn off the ventilation system and seal the house, it takes longer for the birds to die than if you provided heat to speed up the process. Of course, CO2 would be faster but we might have supply issues in the event of a large scale outbreak. While the depopulation methods we investigated are not painless, neither are poultry diseases such as avian influenza that has recently infected many farms in NC. Chickens infected with respiratory diseases such as avian influenza also suffer shortness of breath and other painful symptoms and the suffering continues to happen for several days until death occurs. I wish there were less painful options.”
An employee in Martin’s office suggested contacting “the university” about the study, adding that “in North Carolina we are using the foaming method to depopulate infected flocks for High Path Avian Influenza.” Livingston was unreachable, and neither Anderson nor Berry responded to The Intercept’s requests for comment, nor did NC State’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, which approved the research.
THANKS IN PART to the NC State researchers’ work, the use of ventilation shutdown at U.S. factory farms is increasing in several states. The American Veterinary Medical Association’s depopulation guidelines cite NC State’s research when listing VSD+ as a kill method “permitted in constrained circumstances.” The guidelines note that “a humane approach to the depopulation of animals is warranted, justifiable, and expected by society, but may not be actualized in some cases.” They don’t claim that VSD+ is humane but instead view it as a last resort.
In email correspondence from March obtained by Lowrey in a public records request, Tyson Foods requested and received permission from the Missouri state veterinarian to depopulate a chicken facility with VSD+.
USDA records show that only one HPAI outbreak has been reported in Stoddard County, Missouri, so far this year. It was detected on the day before the email from Tyson was sent, making it almost certain that the nearly 300,000-bird facility was owned by the meat industry giant. In an email to Lowrey, USDA spokesperson Lyndsay Cole confirmed these chickens were killed with a combination of foam (a method that suffocates birds under a blanket of foam) and VSD.
In another email, pertaining to another one of the country’s largest depopulations so far — 2.7 million hens at Cold Spring Egg Farm in Jefferson County, Wisconsin — an APHIS veterinarian asked, “Are we starting VSD+ tomorrow?” Neither Tyson nor Cold Spring Egg Farm responded to The Intercept’s requests for comment.
The vast majority of depopulated birds haven’t tested positive for HPAI. If the virus is detected in even one bird, all the birds in the flock must be killed, even if they live in separate sheds. But the decision to resort to cruel cull methods like VSD+ is a crisis of the meat industry’s making.
“The tragedy here is that our current methods of raising birds for food production, in enormous sheds with millions of stressed, nearly genetically identical birds in close proximity to one another, has resulted in a situation where outbreaks of diseases like HPAI are nearly inevitable and few options exist for humanely killing infected birds,” Reyes-Illg, the Animal Welfare Institute veterinary adviser, wrote to The Intercept. “Killing methods that are more humane than killing via heatstroke require planning and preparation, and some … require more research to be commercially viable, and none of this seems to be a priority for the industry.”
By one count, more than 1,500 U.S. veterinarians, including Reyes-Illg, have urged the American Veterinary Medical Association to reclassify VSD+ as not recommended. AVMA guidelines themselves aren’t legally binding, but they often become the basis for policy. APHIS’s policy on managing bird flu, which draws from the AVMA’s guidelines, states that VSD+ should only be used if other methods — foam or carbon dioxide — won’t be available in time. Foaming is “cruel but not as bad as VSD+,” Reyes-Illg said.
As long as animals are mass produced for food, there will be a need to cull animals in emergencies, and companies have an obligation to prepare for that scenario by having supplies on hand to do it in the least cruel way possible, said Peter Sandøe, a bioethicist at the University of Copenhagen. “Not to embark on such preparations in light of what happened recently” — during the mass exterminations of healthy farm animals due to Covid-19 — “is a sign of a dreadful cynicism and lack of compassion on the side of the industry,” Sandøe added in an email. In the European Union, neither VSD nor firefighting foam are considered acceptable kill methods.
USDA records indicate that VSD was used to kill birds at four facilities in Indiana in 2016, before the NC State research was published. But the NC State report is the only scientific research cited in the AVMA guidelines on ventilation shutdown in birds, though other studies have since been published on the method in birds and pigs.
“I think the AVMA looked to [the NC State] studies and others as some aspect of legitimacy. To say, ‘Yes, this is doable, it’s not that bad,’” said Lowrey, the Animal Outlook attorney. A 2021 letter from the Animal Welfare Institute to the AVMA criticizes the NC State report on numerous scientific grounds and states that it “was so poorly written and/or edited that it was difficult at times to discern what the author was attempting to communicate.” The study uses something called “heat shock protein 70” as a measure of stress in the hens, which both the Animal Welfare Institute and Sherstin Rosenberg said is not a legitimate measure of the animals’ welfare. The funding proposal said the researchers planned to measure corticosterone, a more accepted measure of stress, but the final report makes no mention of it.
“State animal health officials and producers carefully weigh the different options to determine the best option for humane depopulation and do not make such decisions lightly,” USDA spokesperson Mike Stepien told The Intercept in an email. “Ventilation shutdown plus heat or CO2 (VSD+) is at times the only method available to meet the 24–48-hour goal to depopulate the birds and end their suffering from the disease.”
But if a company can perform VSD plus carbon dioxide, then presumably they have access to carbon dioxide and can kill their birds with CO2 gassing alone — a method Reyes-Illg called “relatively humane” compared to VSD. Stepien explained that “ventilation shutdown plus (VSD+) heat is the only VSD+ that has been used in the United States. VSD+ CO2 is theoretical and not yet practical.”
As cruel as VSD is in controlled lab experiments like NC State’s, there is evidence that its real-world implementation on factory farms is botched, resulting in animals being thrown away alive. In undercover video footage of the depopulation at Rembrandt Enterprises (as identified by activists and confirmed by The Intercept with images from Google Maps and Rembrandt’s website) last month, Direct Action Everywhere documented dead hens being moved by conveyor belts into dump trucks. But numerous hens caught on film were still alive and left behind inside the battery cage facility, and one was still alive and standing outside after being dumped.
Rosenberg said it’s easy to mistake live animals who have been unsuccessfully killed in depopulation for dead. “Based on the large number of birds who are alive, healthy, and alert in the footage, it is a certainty that many more who appeared dead were buried alive,” she wrote in a professional opinion after reviewing Direct Action Everywhere’s videos. With millions of hens hastily exterminated at the facility, even a small proportion of them unsuccessfully killed could result in thousands dumped alive.
This is at odds with the AVMA’s standards, which state that VSD+ is permitted in “constrained circumstances” only when “applied in a manner that will produce a 100% mortality rate.”
Whatever the kill method used, factory farm conditions make it exceedingly difficult to carry out depopulations with full mortality, Rosenberg said. “We can quibble about degrees of suffering,” she said. “But in the end, they’re all just terrible methods of killing.”
Rebecca Aldworth, executive director of Humane Society International/Canada, visits a harp seal nursery in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Canada. Michael Bernard/HSI
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Today I’m turning the blog over to my colleague Rebecca Aldworth, executive director of Humane Society International/Canada.
For nearly two decades, Rebecca has been on the literal front lines of the fight to save animals, traveling to the ice floes of the Northwest Atlantic to document Canada’s brutal commercial seal hunt. She’s seen cruelty and refused to look away, instead documenting the slaughter to bring global attention to this issue. And we’ve seen progress: Most major markets no longer accept the trade in commercial seal products, and we’ve saved millions of seals from an unimaginably cruel fate. Yet the killing continues, even as climate change makes survival even more difficult for this ice-dependent species. In this guest post, Rebecca shares her reflections on the seal hunt and makes a powerful plea for ending it, once and for all.
A lone seal pup rests on a fragile ice floe, ocean waves pounding against the sides. He is just 2 weeks old, and he can’t swim for long, so he can’t survive without this ice platform. But the fragile floe is melting fast, and storms are accelerating its disintegration.
Within days, like thousands of other young pups in this area, he is propelled into the freezing ocean. There, he struggles to swim, battling ocean swells and waves, high winds and freezing rain. He is incredibly lucky and, against all odds, makes it to another slab of ice. He pulls himself onto it, one of the few surviving pups in this region. Exhausted, he rests there for a few days.
But soon, it becomes clear that his reprieve is temporary. On a clear and sunny morning, the mechanical roar of a boat engine shatters the peace of the harp seal nursery. A sealer scans the area, spots the young pup and takes aim. A bullet rips through the pup’s back. As his blood pours out onto the ice, the boat inches closer. The pup freezes, instinctively pretending to be dead. The boat arrives at last, and a sealer leans over the side with a gaff, a long wooden pole with a metal hook at the end. The sealer stabs the hook into the pup’s jaw and drags him onto the deck of the vessel. As the pup cries out, the sealer swings his club three times, smashing the pup’s skull.
The fate of this pup is all too common in Atlantic Canada, where the commercial seal hunt has devolved into a heedless slaughter of the survivors of an unfolding climate disaster. Harp seals rely on sea ice to give birth to their pups, and the pups need the ice to remain intact for several weeks until they are strong enough to survive in open water. But in recent decades, we have witnessed a profound change in the ecosystem of the Northwest Atlantic: The sea ice that comprises the harp seal nursery is vanishing at an alarming rate. Climate change is causing the ice to form later in the season, and the thin and fragile ice floes are breaking up far earlier. In some areas, the sea ice isn’t forming at all.
The impact of vanishing Arctic sea ice on ice-dependent species such as polar bears has been the subject of considerable global focus over the years. Yet surprisingly little public attention has been paid to the sub-Arctic, where harp seals reproduce, even though the impacts of climate change on sea ice are far more rapid and dramatic in this region. Thankfully, Canadian government scientists are starting to speak out, noting the serious impact the disappearing ice is having on the harp seals who are the primary targets of the commercial seal hunt.
While some variability in sea ice cover is expected from year to year, in the harp seal whelping areas off Canada’s east coast, the trend is a steady decline. Harp seals are highly adapted to their environments, giving birth to just one pup per year, and populations can be significantly and rapidly affected when environmental conditions are unfavourable. Already, harp seal reproduction rates are dropping, and pup mortality is very high in years with poor ice cover. Scientists warn that, as the sea ice continues to diminish, the impacts on the harp seal population will worsen. Yet in recent years, the Canadian government has authorized annual commercial sealing quotas in excess of 400,000, and tens of thousands of seal pups continue to be shot and beaten to death for their fur each spring.
Despite the ongoing work to slow our planet’s warming, we know that no one can stop the impacts of climate change in the immediate future. But a responsible government can, and should, end commercial hunting of ice-dependent seal pups in a region experiencing such severe impacts of climate change. A mass slaughter of baby seals, carried out at taxpayers’ expense to produce fur coats for the fashion industry, is wildly out of step in a world facing the existential threat of a changing climate.
A few years ago, I traveled to the harp seal nursery by boat to film the commercial seal hunt. At the end of the day, on the eve of the slaughter, I got onto an ice floe where a lone baby seal rested. I sat with her as the sun went down, watching the ocean from a seal’s perspective. Even then, the ice was so broken up, with vast expanses of open water everywhere. In that moment, I came to understand the enormous struggle these young animals face as their sea ice habitat melts away. It was unthinkable that in just hours, sealers would move in and kill these majestic creatures for their fur, in the largest slaughter of marine mammals on Earth.
Right now, the Canadian government has an opportunity to rethink its approach and help protect these seals for future generations. Indeed, the global community is demanding it do so. The killing simply needs to stop—before it is too late.
Since Russia’s war against Ukraine began, Putin-watchers have become increasingly concerned that Russian President Vladimir Putin might use nuclear weapons. For example, Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen — author of an insightful Putin biography — has suggested that Russia may use tactical nuclear weapons against a military target in Poland. American-British financier Bill Browder — who has suffered at Putin’s hand — has even argued in recent days that “it’s probable” that Putin will use nukes.
I share Gessen’s and Browder’s concerns. But why would Putin — the world’s most consequential oligarch — use nukes? Four main arguments have been made so far.
First, and increasingly popular amongst Ukrainians and Americans, is the argument that Putin is evil…
The war in Ukraine massively intensified during its eighth week. Ukraine sank Russia’s flagship in the Black Sea, Russia launched a new phase of the war with a concerted bid to take over the eastern regions of Luhansk and Donetsk, and the United States began to ship heavy artillery to Ukraine.
This military escalation stood in contrast to the lack of diplomatic or economic developments. Russian-Ukrainian talks have stalled and the West has stopped escalating sanctions, instead shipping more weapons to Ukraine.
“This morning, almost along the whole front line of Donetsk, Luhansk and Kharkiv regions, the occupiers attempted to break through our defences,” said Oleksiy Davilov, secretary of Ukraine’s national security council, told Ukrainian media on April 18. “Fortunately our military is holding out. They passed through only…
CASPER, Wyo. — A family pet will likely lose part of its leg after coming into contact with an illegally set trap in Evansville.
According to a social media post by the Evansville Police Department, the cat was missing for two days before being returned with a trap attached to its leg.
The incident happened on the east side near Williams Street, the post said.
“These traps are illegal in town as they can cause significant damage to animals and humans who get snared by them,” the EPD said, adding that citizens should be aware of the traps.
In an email to Oil City News, Evansville Chief of Police Mike Thompson said the type of trap was a foothold spring trap with 4-inch…
Bossier Parish Sheriff’s Department announced Monday that a Plain Dealing man who has been terrorizing Bossier Parish for over 15 years has pled guilty to terroristic acts.
“It does not matter how long it takes, if there is an unsolved case we will pursue it until the guilty person is caught,” Bossier Sheriff Julian Whittington said.
Gary Lee Wilson, 58, was arrested on Feb. 26, 2018, for crimes that date back over 15 years.
Through the investigation detectiveswith the Bossier Parish Sheriff’s Department discovered that Wilson was responsible forvandalizing property, burningdeer standsand deer camps.
Wilson also placed metal spikes on trails to cripple horses and on roads to flatten tires.
On one occasion, Wilson attempted to lure deputies into a trap by covering an old, abandoned water well.
Leah Shaffer picks up Gertie, her 1-year-old Barred Rock chicken, on April 4, outside of her home in St. Charles. Shaffer purchased four chickens to care for at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.
In fall 2020, Leah Shaffer ordered four chickens from a Missouri hatchery — a pandemic impulse purchase to get her two children outside, she said.
“I wanted them to have a reason to go out basically into the backyard and just have some real life sort of experience with nature instead of just computer time,” said Shaffer, who lives in St. Charles, Missouri.
The four hens — Gertie, Jeff, Cherry and Rivers Cuomo — have been very healthy. They’re energetic. And they’re laying eggs.
