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Wildlife advocates are offering a $50,000 bounty to help catch wolf poachers
By Sam Brasch
·Nov. 27, 2024, 4:00 am
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- Wildlife advocates are offering a $50,000 bounty to help catch wolf poachers
By Sam Brasch
·Nov. 27, 2024, 4:00 am
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https://www.cpr.org/2024/11/27/bounty-to-catch-wolf-poachers/
A wildlife advocacy group launched a $50,000 reward last week for information leading to the conviction of anyone who illegally kills a wolf in Colorado.
The Rocky Mountain Wolf Project — a group established by supporters of Colorado’s 2020 wolf reintroduction ballot measure — announced the program after federal investigators revealed someone likely shot a wolf reintroduced to Colorado. While it appears the animal died following a battle with another wolf, it carried a healed bullet wound on its back leg undetected by state wildlife officials who captured and released the predator last winter.
“The preponderance of evidence suggests [the wound] probably happened in Colorado because it wasn’t detected when they caught that wolf in Oregon,” said Rob Edward, president of the Rocky Mountain Wolf Project. “We just decided that was the time to launch it — because it appears somebody is out there shooting at wolves.”
Colorado is set to release a second batch of 10 to 15 wolves this winter as a part of a controversial restoration project narrowly approved by voters in 2020.
The state released an initial group of 10 wolves in Grand County and Summit County last December. Since then, three of the animals have died, but it doesn’t appear that any were killed by people.
State and federal law prohibits anyone from killing or harassing gray wolves. Ahead of the reintroduction effort, Colorado Parks and Wildlife received a special permit under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, which allows the agency to remove wolves as a management tool to protect people and livestock. Anyone else who harms a wolf could face jail time, a loss of hunting privileges and up to $100,000 in fines.
Colorado also already operates an anti-poaching reward program. Operation Game Thiefeif offers up to $500 to anyone with information about someone who poaches big game or members of an endangered species, and up to $1,000 for especially flagrant cases.
Edward, however, said his organization wasn’t convinced the state’s reward was enough to protect wolves during the first stages of the reintroduction process. To offer a greater financial incentive, the organization collected donations from private individuals and other wildlife advocacy groups, including the Wolf and Wildlife Project, the Colorado Wolf and Wildlife Center, the Sacred Wolf Foundation and the Lockwood Animal Rescue Center.
To collect the reward, Edward said people with information about wolf poaching must call the tip line for Operation Game Thief, and then tell the Rocky Mountain Wolf Project if the information leads to any formal charges filed by the state or federal government.
Edward said his organization explored offering the reward through a formal partnership with Colorado Parks and Wildlife. He said the state determined it could not directly cooperate with the wildlife advocacy group, but it hasn’t pushed back against the project.
Travis Duncan, a spokesperson for Colorado Parks and Wildlife, declined to comment on the new reward program but reiterated it’s illegal to kill a wolf in Colorado for any reason other than self-defense.
Why are deer hunters suddenly dying in Michigan?
8 million turkeys will be thrown in the trash this Thanksgiving
We don’t have to accept all that death and waste for a dry, flavorless bird no one likes.
Nov 27, 2024, 5:30 AM PST
A turkey arrives at the 2024 White House turkey pardon, a strange annual “song and dance of celebrating turkeys while we torture them,” as Vox’s Kenny Torrella put it last year.| Susan Walsh/Associated Press
Marina Bolotnikova is a deputy editor for Vox’s Future Perfect section. Before joining Vox, she reported on factory farming for national outlets including the Guardian, the Intercept, and elsewhere.
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On Thursday, tens of millions of Americans will partake in a national ritual many of us say we don’t especially enjoy or find meaning in. We will collectively eat more than 40 million turkeys — factory farmed and heavily engineered animals that bear scant resemblance to the wild birds that have been apocryphally written into the Thanksgiving story. (The first Thanksgiving probably didn’t have turkey.) And we will do it all even though turkey meat is widely considered flavorless and unpalatable.
“It is, almost without fail, a dried-out, depressing hunk of sun-baked papier-mâché — a jaw-tiringly chewy, unsatisfying, and depressingly bland workout,” journalist Brian McManus wrote for Vice. “Deep down, we know this, but bury it beneath happy memories of Thanksgivings past.”
So what is essentially the national holiday of meat-eating revolves around an animal dish that no one really likes. That fact clashes with the widely accepted answer to the central question of why it’s so hard to convince everyone to ditch meat, or even to eat less of it: the taste, stupid.
Undoubtedly, that has something to do with it. But I think the real answer is a lot more complicated, and the tasteless Thanksgiving turkey explains why.
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Humans crave ritual, belonging, and a sense of being part of a larger story — aspirations that reach their apotheosis at the Thanksgiving table. We don’t want to be social deviants who boycott the central symbol of one of our most cherished national holidays, reminding everyone of the animal torture and environmental degradation that went into making it. What could be more human than to go along with it, dry meat and all?
Our instincts for conformity seem particularly strong around food, a social glue that binds us to one another and to our shared past. And although many of us today recognize there’s something very wrong with how our meat is produced, Thanksgiving of all occasions might seem like an ideal time to forget that for a day.
In my experience, plenty of people who are trying to cut back on meat say they eat vegetarian or vegan when cooking for themselves — but when they are guests at other people’s homes or celebrating a special occasion, they’ll eat whatever, to avoid offending their hosts or provoking awkward conversations about factory farming.
But this Thanksgiving, I want to invite you, reader, to flip this logic. If the social and cultural context of food shapes our tastes, even more than taste itself, then it is in precisely these settings that we should focus efforts to change American food customs for the better.
“It’s eating with others where we actually have an opportunity to influence broader change, to share plant-based recipes, spark discussion, and revamp traditions to make them more sustainable and compassionate,” Natalie Levin, a board member at PEAK Animal Sanctuary in Indiana and an acquaintance of mine from vegan Twitter, told me.
Hundreds of years ago, a turkey on Thanksgiving might have represented abundance and good tidings — a too-rare thing in those days, and therefore something to be grateful for. Today, it’s hard to see it as anything but a symbol of our profligacy and unrestrained cruelty against nonhuman animals. On a day meant to embody the best of humanity, and a vision for a more perfect world, surely we can come up with better symbols.
Besides, we don’t even like turkey. We should skip it this year.
The misery of the Thanksgiving turkey
In 2023, my colleague Kenny Torrella published a wrenching investigation into conditions in the US turkey industry. He wrote:
The Broad Breasted White turkey, which accounts for 99 out of every 100 grocery store turkeys, has been bred to emphasize — you guessed it — the breast, one of the more valuable parts of the bird. These birds grow twice as fast and become nearly twice as big as they did in the 1960s. Being so top-heavy, combined with other health issues caused by rapid growth and the unsanitary factory farming environment, can make it difficult for them to walk.
Another problem arises from their giant breasts: The males get so big that they can’t mount the hens, so they must be bred artificially.
Author Jim Mason detailed this practice in his book The Ethics of What We Eat, co-authored with philosopher Peter Singer. Mason took a job with the turkey giant Butterball to research the book, where, he wrote, he had to hold male turkeys while another worker stimulated them to extract their semen into a syringe using a vacuum pump. Once the syringe was full, it was taken to the henhouse, where Mason would pin hens chest-down while another worker inserted the contents of the syringe into the hen using an air compressor.
Workers at the farm had to do this to one hen every 12 seconds for 10 hours a day. It was “the hardest, fastest, dirtiest, most disgusting, worst-paid work” he had ever done, Mason wrote.
In the wild, turkeys live in “smallish groups of a dozen or so, and they know each other, they relate to each other as individuals,” Singer, author of the new book Consider the Turkey, said on a recent episode of the Simple Heart podcast. “The turkeys sold on Thanksgiving never see their mothers, they never go and forage for food… They’re pretty traumatized, I’d say, by having thousands of strange birds around who they can’t get to know as individuals,” packed together in crowded sheds.
From birth to death, the life of a factory-farmed turkey is one punctuated by rote violence, including mutilations to their beaks, their toes, and snoods, a grueling trip to the slaughterhouse, and a killing process where they’re roughly grabbed and prodded, shackled upside down, and sent down a fast-moving conveyor belt of killing. “If they’re lucky, they get stunned and then the knife cuts their throat,” Singer said. “If they’re not so lucky, they miss the stunner and the knife cuts their throat while they’re fully conscious.”
On Thanksgiving, Americans throw the equivalent of about 8 million of these turkeys in the trash, according to an estimate by ReFED, a nonprofit that works to reduce food waste. And this year will be the third Thanksgiving in a row celebrated amid an out-of-control bird flu outbreak, in which tens of millions of chickens and turkeys on infected farms have been culled using stomach-churning extermination methods.
Turkeys depopulated using firefighting foam after a bird flu outbreak.Glass Walls/We Animals Media
Two baby turkeys still alive after their flockmates were culled with firefighting foam due to a bird flu outbreak in Israel.Glass Walls/We Animals Media
Reclaiming Thanksgiving
When I search for the language for this grim state of affairs, I can only describe it in religious terms, as a kind of desecration — of our planet’s abundance, of our humanity, of life itself. On every other day of the year, it’s obscene enough. On a holiday that’s supposed to represent our gratitude for the Earth’s blessings, you can understand why Thanksgiving, for many vegetarians or vegans, is often described as the most alienating day of the year.
I count myself among that group, although I don’t dread Thanksgiving. I’ve come to love it as a holiday ripe for creative reinvention. I usually spend it making a feast of plant-based dishes (known by most people as “sides,” though there’s no reason they can’t be the main event).
To name a few: a creamy lentil-stuffed squash, cashew lentil bake, a bright autumnal brussels sprout salad, roasted red cabbage with walnuts and feta (sub with dairy-free cheese), mushroom clam-less chowder (I add lots of white beans), challah for bread rolls, a pumpkin miso tart more complex and interesting than any Thanksgiving pie you’ve had, and rasmalai, a Bengali dessert whose flavors align beautifully with the holidays.
Vegan turkey roasts are totally optional, though many of them have gotten very good in recent years — I love the Gardein breaded roast and Field Roast hazelnut and cranberry. You can also make your own.
The hardest part of going meatless is not about the food (if it were, it might not be so hard to convince Americans to abandon parched roast turkey). “It’s about unpleasant truths and ethical disagreements being brought out into the open,” Levin said, about confronting the bizarre dissonance in celebrations of joy and giving carved from mass-produced violence.
These conversations are not easy, but they are worth having. And we don’t have to fear losing the rituals that define us as Americans. To the contrary, culture is a continuous conversation we have with each other about our shared values — and any culture that’s not changing is dead. There’s far more meaning to be had, I’ve found, in adapting traditions that are no longer authentic to our ethics and violate our integrity. We can start on Thanksgiving.
Rescued turkeys at Farm Sanctuary, an organization in upstate New York that cares for rescued farm animals, feast on a banquet of fruits and veg
Cat injured by hunting snare epitmoizes trend in pets caught in wildlife traps
Most “humane” farms are lying to you — and the government isn’t stopping them
A new investigation finds false advertising continues to dupe consumers.
Updated Nov 14, 2024, 9:42 AM PST
A flock of large white broiler chickens, approximately 10 weeks old, are ready to be processed.Monica Fecke/Moment via Getty Images
Kenny Torrella is a senior reporter for Vox’s Future Perfect section, with a focus on animal welfare and the future of meat.
An overwhelming majority of Americans say they’re concerned about the treatment of animals raised for meat, and many believe they can help by simply selecting from one of the many brands that advertise their chicken or pork as “humane.” But such marketing claims have long borne little resemblance to the ugly reality of raising animals for meat.
Nearly all farmed animals in the US live on mega factory farms, where they’re mutilated without pain relief and fattened up in dark, overcrowded warehouses before being shipped off to the slaughterhouse. Only a tiny sliver of livestock are actually reared on the small, higher-welfare farms that many companies conjure on their packaging with quaint red barns and green rolling hills — and even those operations can be rife with animal suffering.
Over the summer, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) had an opportunity to fix the false advertising problem pervasive in the meat aisle when it published updated guidelines that companies must follow when making animal welfare claims on their labels. Instead, its new guidance barely changed anything.
The updated rules “remain insufficient to combat misleading label claims used to market meat and poultry products,” as the nonprofit Animal Welfare Institute put it, allowing companies “to essentially make up their own definitions with no repercussions.” (The one improvement, the organization noted, was a clearer definition of the term “pasture raised,” though that label remains poorly enforced and does not guarantee animals were raised humanely.)
Here’s how the USDA’s guidelines work: If a meat company wants to make an animal welfare or environment-related claim on its packaging, it must fill out a form with an illustration of its label and an explanation as to how the animals are raised to justify the claim; how the company will ensure the claim is valid from birth to slaughter to sale; and whether or not an independent, third-party organization certified the claim, which is optional. The USDA never conducts surprise audits, or any audits at all, to verify the company is telling the truth. It is, in essence, an honor system.
The USDA also has an incredibly low, and often nonsensical, bar for what passes as humane treatment.
The agency states, for example, that a chicken company can use the term “humanely raised” if it feeds its birds an all-vegetarian diet, which has virtually no bearing on their welfare (chickens are omnivores).
Similarly, the agency says pork can be labeled “humanely raised” if the company provides its pigs with “proper shelter and rest areas.” By that definition, standard factory farms — which produce practically all US pork — are humane because they provide ample shelter in the form of vast, crowded warehouses where the animals have nothing to do but rest on the same concrete flooring where they defecate and urinate.
Chickens raised for meat at an operation in Maryland.Edwin Remsberg/The Image Bank via Getty Images
Pigs at a breeding farm.Chayakorn Lotongkum/iStock via Getty Images
“I think that a lot of this is out of touch with what consumers are really thinking these claims mean,” P. Renée Wicklund, co-founder of Richman Law & Policy — a law firm that takes meat, dairy, and egg companies to court over false claims — told me.
Over the last decade, the Animal Welfare Institute has requested from the USDA the applications that meat companies submitted for 97 animal welfare claims. For the overwhelming majority of them, there were either no records at all or the justifications for the labels had little to no relevance to animal welfare.
The USDA declined an interview request for this story and didn’t directly respond to numerous detailed questions. Instead, it sent a statement that read in part: “USDA continues to deliver on its commitment to fairness and choice for both farmers and consumers, and that means supporting transparency and high-quality standards.”
To be fair to the agency, it doesn’t have the authority to conduct on-farm audits, which would require an act of Congress. But it does have authority to define animal welfare claims, an authority it rarely exercises. Instead, it allows companies to define animal welfare claims themselves.
The USDA also added it “strongly encourages” companies to validate animal welfare claims using third-party certifiers — private organizations that audit conditions on farms and license the use of their own humane labels. But a recent undercover investigation into one of the nation’s biggest “humane-certified” poultry companies shows how low third-party certification standards can be.
Chickens kicked and run over with forklifts: Inside a “humane-certified” poultry farm
Foster Farms, the 11th largest chicken company in the US, advertises meat from animals raised with supposedly “better care.” On its packaging, chickens are shown roaming free on pasture, even though the company’s conventionally raised birds will never step foot onto grass. On its website, Foster Farms says its farming is “safe, sustainable, and humane” and that its chickens are “raised on local West Coast farms” with “strenuous, high standards.”
The company also promotes its chicken as “cage free” with “no added hormones or steroids ever.” But touting these aspects is misleading because chickens raised for meat in the US are not kept in cages — only those raised for eggs are — and it’s illegal to feed chickens hormones or steroids.
“They’re feel-good words, but they don’t have any real meaning,” veterinarian Gail Hansen told Vox.
This summer, an undercover investigator with the animal rights group Animal Outlook worked for a month on the company’s catch crew, a job that entails grabbing chickens on farms, stuffing them into crates, and loading them onto trucks bound for the slaughterhouse.
Over the course of more than a dozen shifts at multiple Foster Farms facilities, the investigator — who requested anonymity due to the covert nature of undercover investigations — documented workers slamming birds into crates, kicking and hitting chickens, and numerous instances of forklift drivers running over birds.
The investigator recalled making eye contact with a bird shortly after they were run over by a forklift. “They were being crushed and everything was being pushed forward, and they had their beak open, and they had this look on their face like they knew that they were dying,” the investigator told me. “And then I watched them flap and struggle for a moment before passing.”
“From a veterinary perspective, some of the things are just horrific,” Hansen said.
The investigator chalked up most of the cruelty to the chaotic, fast-paced work environment imposed by supervisors during long, grueling shifts.
Foster Farms did not respond to a list of detailed questions but did send a press release detailing how it had fired several employees and reported them to Fresno County law enforcement. The company said it has retrained employees on animal welfare, created additional animal welfare roles, and will increase the frequency of its audits.
“Put simply, the conduct was counter to everything we stand for as a company, and our actions ensure those responsible are held accountable,” wrote Randy Boyce, general counsel for Foster Farms.
Cheryl Leahy, who was executive director of Animal Outlook when the investigation was released but has since left the organization, said the company’s problems go much deeper than just a few employees.
Related:
- The “humanewashing” of America’s meat and dairy, explained
- Undercover audio of a Tyson employee reveals “free-range” chicken is meaningless
- “Wild-caught,” “organic,” “grass-fed”: What do all these animal welfare labels actually mean?
Cruelty is “woven into the culture,” Leahy said. “It is a feature, not a bug. It is a business practice. There is a decision made to go with volume and speed” over animal welfare.
In recent years, the USDA has cited Foster Farms for 18 incidents of violating federal animal welfare laws. Numerous other investigations into Foster Farms facilities have found cruel conditions and practices that, to be fair to the company, have also been documented across the US poultry industry.
Foster Farms’ announced reforms in response to Animal Outlook’s latest investigation are unlikely to do much to improve overall conditions, Leahy said. It has already taken similar actions — penalizing workers and increasing training — in the wake of previous investigations. More importantly, the company’s animal welfare standards are already at rock bottom, in line with the rest of the chicken industry.
But you wouldn’t know that from its marketing or its “American Humane” certification.
How misleading marketing — enabled by the USDA — tricks consumers
For years, Foster Farms has bolstered its humane image through a certification from the nonprofit American Humane — the kind of third-party organization that the USDA “strongly encourages” meat companies making humane claims to work with. As of the late 2010s, the company paid American Humane $375,000 annually for its certification, and a lawsuit claimed that American Humane would give Foster Farms seven to 14 days’ notice of an audit, allowing them to prepare for the visits.
Animal advocacy groups like Animal Outlook argue that American Humane’s standards largely mirror that of the typical chicken factory farm, not the higher-welfare conditions a consumer would reasonably expect.
Hansen, the veterinarian, echoed that sentiment: “The daylight between them is pretty narrow.”
American Humane’s “standards are not meant to actually bring these companies up to a level of palatability for the public,” Leahy said. “What they’re trying to do is stop the criticism.”
A former American Humane executive is now an owner and partner of a PR firm that defends factory farm interests and executive director of a related pro-factory farming organization. American Humane did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
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A 2015 class-action lawsuit, alleging that Foster Farms misleads consumers with its American Humane Certified label, demonstrates how the USDA’s low standards enable such deception: In a 2018 decision, a three-judge panel rejected an appeal in part because the USDA had already approved the label.
“The Foster Farms of the world can say, ‘Look, this was approved by a government agency,’” Wicklund said. (Wicklund’s law firm, Richman Law & Policy, has represented and co-counseled with Animal Outlook in meat labeling lawsuits; earlier this year, it filed a legal complaint against Foster Farms over its animal welfare claims, which is ongoing.)
The recently released Animal Outlook investigation reported that Foster Farms employees — and, according to the undercover investigator, its supervisors, too — did violate some of American Humane’s poultry handling standards, which are laid out in a dense 115-page document. However, Foster Farms remains certified by American Humane — when companies are in violation of the organization’s standards, there are seemingly no penalties. They have to fill out a form explaining how they’ll meet full compliance in the future and alert American Humane when that’s been done. Companies can still obtain certification even if they don’t fully pass their annual audit. (And numerous investigations into poultry companies have found that rough handling appears to be the industry norm, not the exception).
While some animal certification programs do set standards above the industry norm, what makes especially weak third-party certifications like American Humane’s so fundamentally inadequate — and deceptive — is that they permit the worst systemic abuses of poultry farming: cruel breeding practices, overcrowding, and especially inhumane slaughter methods.
Virtually all chickens raised for meat in the US have been bred to grow so big so fast that they’re in constant pain. Many have difficulty walking or even standing and are more likely to suffer from leg deformities, heart attacks, and other health issues when compared to heritage breeds that grow at a normal pace. Animal Outlook’s investigator alleged that many of the birds in the Foster Farms operations couldn’t walk and that some had broken legs. American Humane’s standards allow for these rapid-growth chickens, which animal rights activists call “Frankenchickens.”
The group’s standards also allow for overcrowding, giving birds a little more space than the industry standard but what still amounts to almost 20 percent less space than what animal advocacy groups argue should be the bare minimum. American Humane allows for the standard chicken slaughter process: shackling chickens upside down, dunking them in a bath of electrified water to stun them unconscious, slitting their throats, and then placing them in a scalding vat to loosen their feathers.
Despite all that, the resulting meat can still be advertised as humane, sustainable, and produced from healthy birds.
The empty claims many meat companies make on their labels and in their advertising stem from forces bigger than the USDA and third-party certifiers. Currently, chickens and other poultry birds have zero federal legal protections while on the farm or in the slaughterhouse, and third-party certification programs make an exceptionally weak substitute for this legal gap. If we wanted truly “humanely raised” chicken, we’d have to fundamentally change how chickens are farmed, which would require significant anti-cruelty legislation from Congress. That would substantially raise the price of chicken, making it more of a delicacy than a staple.
But the USDA, the poultry giants, and the dubious third-party certification schemes would like us to believe otherwise — that wholesome marketing and hollow honor systems can fix the horrific reality of what it is to be a farmed animal in the US.
Lost backcountry hunter found cold and hungry but OK, Grand County Search and Rescue says
Man arrested after killing squirrels in east Tulsa park
- FOX23.com News Staff
- Nov 24, 2024
- https://www.fox23.com/news/man-arrested-after-killing-squirrels-in-east-tulsa-park/article_257b0cc2-aa68-11ef-b709-0b1ad3d3a23a.html
TULSA, Okla. — The Tulsa Police Department said a man was arrested after he shot and killed multiple squirrels in an east Tulsa park on Saturday.
Police said officers were called to McClure Park around 3:45 p.m. on reports of squirrel hunters in the area.
When officers arrived, they saw 23-year-old Kenric McFrazier walking across the park with a pellet rifle. Police said another suspect, Darrell McJunkins was still in the car.
The suspects told police they had been driving around the park shooting squirrels with scoped pellet rifles and collecting them to eat. The suspects also told police they came to the park because they do not have a good place to hunt squirrels and the park has a lot of them.
Officers found six dead squirrels, two scoped pellet guns and two pistols in the suspects’ car.
Police said due to McFrazier’s past criminal record, he can not possess guns.
McFrazier was arrested for possession of a firearm by a felon and hunting without a license. His hunting partner was cited for hunting in a city park and released.
McJunkins was issued a citation for hunting without a license.
The guns were seized as evidence, police said.
California case is the 1st confirmed bird flu infection in a US child
There is no evidence bird flu spread from the child to other people
By Mike Stobbe, Jonel Aleccia and The Associated Press • Published November 25, 2024 • Updated on November 25, 2024 at 11:24 am
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The child experienced mild symptoms, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Control and Prevention.
Health officials on Friday confirmed bird flu in a California child — the first reported case in a U.S. minor.
The child had mild symptoms, was treated with antiviral medication and is recovering, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in announcing the test results. State officials have said the child attends day care and lives in Alameda County, which includes Oakland and surrounding communities, but released no other details.
The infection brings the reported number of U.S. bird flu cases this year to 55, including 29 in California, the CDC said. Most were farmworkers who tested positive with mild symptoms.
One exception was an adult in Missouri who did not work at a farm and had no known contact with an infected animal. It remains a mystery how that person was infected — health officials have said there was no evidence of it spreading between people.
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A British Columbia teen also was recently hospitalized with bird flu, Canadian officials have said.
H5N1 bird flu has been spreading widely in the U.S. among wild birds, poultry and a number of other animals over the last few years.
It began spreading in U.S. dairy cattle in March. California has become the center of that outbreak, with 402 infected herds detected there since August. That’s 65% of the 616 herds confirmed with the virus in 15 states.
Officials said they were investigating how the child was infected. California health officials previously said in a statement that they were looking into a “possible exposure to wild birds.”
There is no evidence bird flu spread from the child to other people.
People in the child’s household reported having similar symptoms, but their test results were negative for bird flu. Health officials noted the child and the household members also tested positive for other common respiratory viruses.
Exposing the Big Game 