6 June 2023

Action Alert Courtesy of Victoria Hart,
Ohio Animal Rights Activist

Read Dr. Buyukmihci’s Letter to the Director of the Oberlin Public Library:

https://www.upc-online.org/hatching/230606_help_us_shut_down_oberlin_public_librarys_cruel_chick_hatching_events.html

Emeritus Professor of Veterinary Medicine:
Library Chick-Hatching Event is “Inhumane”

In honor of May’s International Respect for Chickens Month, we began efforts to shut down a cruelly exploitative chick hatching event at Oberlin Public Library (OPL) in Oberlin, Ohio – a town known for its historic fight for abolition, equality, sensitivity, and inclusivity.

The OPL arranges this yearly event through Ohio State University’s (OSU’s) Extension Program and is made available to all public libraries in Lorain County, Ohio. Eggs for this program come from Meyer Hatchery, in Polk, Ohio. See meyerhatchery.com.

This year’s chick-hatching event at OPL began in late April, 2023. David Fausnaugh, the new Library Director, is the person responsible for deciding to have chick-hatching events at the library. These free public events are for the community’s entertainment (in the guise of “education”), in the hope of prompting monetary donations and/or new memberships from visitors who find the event appealing and thus worth continuing.

The chick-hatching event stretched into May 2023, and on May 4 (United Poultry Concerns’ International Respect for Chickens Day), a group of local activists protested outside the library. In response, the library covertly ended the event prematurely, trying to avoid further negative attention. By that time, it was known that one egg out of the eleven featured in the event “didn’t make it,” and at least two hatched chicks were visibly ill. Most disturbing was the fact that one tiny brown chick with splayed legs was separated from the others, trapped inside a makeshift room divider inside the comfortless metal cage. This weak, sickly chick was seen suffering in distress and misery and died not long after. It is suspected that the sick chicks were denied proper medical care, contrary to Mr. Fausnaugh’s claim when questioned about it.

The activists have continued their protests, calling the OPL’s chick hatching event CRUEL and SHAMEFUL based on the following:

1. At this year’s chick-hatching event, eleven eggs were placed inside of a comfortless styrofoam incubator machine. Those eleven eggs were from mother hens who were exploited for their egg producing capabilities, had their eggs stolen from them, and became stressed and frustrated when their strong brooding instincts were thwarted.
2. Newly hatched chicks peeped and searched about for their absent mothers, instinctively seeking their safety, nurturing, and guidance. The incubator they were trapped in bore no resemblance whatsoever to a welcoming, protective mother hen they so desperately needed.
3. While trapped inside the incubator and later when placed in a metal cage, the chicks trampled and pecked at each other, were handled by staff, and were poked at by visitors. The chicks were forced to endure bright lights, strange sounds/voices, and other intrusive conditions as both staff and visitors hovered over the unnatural spectacle throughout the library’s open hours. This constantly disrupted the chicks’ sleep, a crucial need for baby chicks. (These continuous interruptions could be seen on a livestream of the event on the OPL’s YouTube channel.)
4. The eggs came from “America’s industry-leading hatchery” – Meyer Hatchery in Polk, Ohio – a hatchery offering “more than 160 breeds of poultry including chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys, guineas, and game birds.” Hatcheries are known to destroy male chicks as well as any sick or otherwise unwanted female chicks after hatching. Gruesome “standard practices” for murdering hatchery chicks include gassing, suffocation in plastic bags, or shredding chicks alive in macerators.
5. In 2022, the library had their first chick-hatching program. One of the librarians volunteered to take the chicks home with her once the event ended. She was permitted to do so, and off they went. But later, as the chicks grew a bit older, the librarian discovered that 5 out of the surviving 6 chicks turned out to be males who were growing into roosters. Not wanting “annoying” roosters, she tried finding homes for them but was unsuccessful. She then took the 5 male chicks to a farm that would “take care of them.” Upon learning this, an activist asked the librarian if that farm was a sanctuary and was told that the farm was “a place that processes roosters.” (Like so many others who “keep” chickens in order to steal their eggs, she felt that since the roosters wouldn’t be profitable they were unworthy of living.) Mr. Fausnaugh allowed this same librarian to take home all of the surviving chicks when this year’s (2023) chick-hatching event abruptly ended. Both Mr. Fausnaugh and the librarian refused to release the chicks to farm animal sanctuaries that activists had lined up.

Mr. Fausnaugh is claiming that he personally didn’t see any animal cruelty. Along with this, he’s made numerous mentions that the library received a greater amount of positive feedback from the community versus vocal protest from a small group. It is because of this overall positive feedback that Mr. Fausnaugh is unwilling to “definitively” say whether he’ll be renewing the chick-hatching event in the future. What we are asking is that he state in writing that he will NOT renew OSU’s chick-hatching program NOR decide to have other library programs featuring animals dead or alive.

Chick-hatching programs are CRUEL lessons, but thankfully, kind alternatives are available that do not exploit animals. United Poultry Concerns puts out a helpful 16-page booklet titled Hatching Good Lessons: Alternatives To School Hatching Projects. (NOTE: Mr. Fausnaugh and his staff have already been given copies of this booklet. As yet, there has been no response.)

PLEASE help us end Oberlin Public Library’s chick-hatching events once and for all by contacting Mr. Fausnaugh with a message of support for our efforts to shut down this program. Your action could help convince Mr. Fausnaugh that the program is not worth renewing.

You can phone David Fausnaugh
(Oberlin Public Library’s new Director)

at 440-775-4790

and/or

EMAIL him at dfausnaugh@oberlinlibrary.org

• Alerts
• International Respect for Chickens Day
• Humane Education

Wed, June 7, 2023 by News Staff

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Photo: Ontario County Humane Society (provided)

Pair Arrested for Abandoning Emaciated Dog in Phelps

The owners of the dog that died after being found abandoned and emaciated last week in Phelps have been found.

According to the Ontario County Humane Society, 21-year old Mackenzie Clarke of Newark and her boyfriend Isiah Dishaw have been charged with Aggravated Cruelty to an Animal, a felony, and Animal Abandonment, a misdemeanor. Clarke was also charged with Falsely Reporting an Incident.

Clarke claimed that she and Dishaw tried to take her 1-year old Pitbull mix, named Ash, to the Humane Society last Thursday after becoming ill but they weren’t open. She then decided to leave Ash on the side of Styker Road and reported the abandoned dog to authorities.

Ash would die the next day.

Both Clarke and Dishaw will answer their charges at a later date in Phelps Town Court.

Think that eating local will help save the planet? Think again. Most emissions come from food production, not transportation

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About this content

Cecilia NowellWed 7 Jun 2023 09.00 EDT

• https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/07/is-eating-local-better-environment

In June 2005, four women spoke at a San Francisco celebration of the first World Environment Day in North America. The Bay Area locals – Jen Maiser, Jessica Prentice, Sage Van Wing and Dede Sampson – invited the audience to join them in a local food challenge: spending the next month eating only food produced within 100 miles (160km) of their homes.

Although the concept of eating locally was not new – the farm-to-table movement had kicked off in the 1960s and 70s as hippies protested against processed foods and Alice Waters opened the first farm-to-table restaurant, Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, California – these women gave it new life with a new name, calling themselves “locavores”. In his 2006 book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Bay Area local Michael Pollan also advocated for the local food movement, and by 2007 the Oxford American Dictionary had dubbed “locavore” its word of the year.

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Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe that eating local food is better for the environment. But in recent years, a series of studies have shown that eating locally might not be as environmentally impactful – in and of itself – as advocates once hoped. In fact, research shows that the carbon footprint of transporting food is relatively small, and that it’s more important to focus on how your food is produced. Eating local can be a part of that, but it doesn’t have to be.

What’s the evidence for eating local?

In 1994, the UK-based Sustainable Agriculture Food and Environment Alliance (now called Sustain) published The Food Miles Report – the Dangers of Long-Distance Food Transport, which offered scientific backing for the burgeoning local food movement. It argued that the long-distance transportation of food was only possible because of cheap, non-renewable fossil fuels that allowed transnational corporations to “exploit land, labour and resources in developing countries for the production of raw commodities to which they add considerable mark-ups before sale in the North”.

“As you can perceive in the title, food miles were initially considered (almost by definition) as a big threat and contributor to climate change,” Laura Enthoven, a PhD researcher in agricultural economics at the Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium and author of a recent review of local food systems research, said in an email. The farther food had to travel, the more fossil fuel was used and greenhouse gases emitted.

Those emissions are especially high for food transported by airplane: food that is flown is responsible for up to 50 times as much carbon dioxide as food transported by boat. Fortunately, very little food travels by air (think perishables that need to be eaten soon after harvest, like asparagus and berries). Many fruits and vegetables with a longer shelf life, like apples and broccoli, can be shipped by boat, truck or rail, whose food miles produce far fewer emissions.

Is it the best way to reduce food-related emissions?

In the 2000s, scientists began conducting full life cycle assessments of food supply chains – looking at how much greenhouse gases are emitted not just when food is transported, but also when crops are planted and fertilized, animals are taken out to pasture or kept in confinement, and food scraps end up in the garbage. What they found was that transporting food made up a relatively small percentage of food’s total carbon footprint.

In a 2018 paper, a team of researchers from the UK and Switzerland found that only 1% to 9% of food’s emissions come from packaging, transport and retail. The vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions – 61% – come during production, while food is still on the farm. That’s supported by research published in the early 2000s in the US and Europe.

What we eat and how it is produced makes more impact on our food carbon footprint than purely where it comes from in terms of distance

Researcher Laura Enthoven

“What we eat and how it is produced makes more impact on our food carbon footprint than purely where it comes from in terms of distance,” said Enthoven.

The greatest source of emissions can vary among foods. In many crops, it’s the fertilizer and pesticides required to grow large quantities of food on industrial farms. In beef, for example, less than 1% of emissions come from transportation while the vast majority come just from feeding cattle (and their methane-heavy burps).

Scientists are still grappling with how to define food miles: some only take into account the emissions of transporting food while others consider the full life cycle of producing food in one region before it is moved to another. As recently as last year, a study in Nature Food found that food miles accounted for a significantly larger share of the food system’s emissions than had been previously thought by taking into account the emissions from transporting fertilizers, machinery and animal feed to grow that food.skip past newsletter promotion

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So is eating local worth it?

Does the research mean there are no benefits to eating locally? “It depends,” both Enthoven and Mike Hamm, a professor emeritus and founding director of the Michigan State University Center for Regional Food Systems, said separately. Eating locally can be a means of supporting farms that use more environmentally friendly production practices, such as minimizing their use of fossil fuel-rich pesticides and fertilizers.

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“I’ve often said the whole idea of local foods wasn’t about just reducing food miles,” said John Ikerd, professor emeritus of agricultural economics at the University of Missouri. It’s also a solution for people “looking for an alternative to the industrial food system”.

Ikerd recalls the farm-to-table movement and hippy-led rebellion against industrial food beginning shortly after Rachel Carson’s indictment of pesticides, Silent Spring, was published in 1962. That led to the birth of the organic food movement, which sought to produce food without greenhouse gas-emitting fertilizers, pesticides and other chemicals. But as more corporations began producing organic-labeled food, Ikerd saw consumers turn to local farms where they might have a better sense of how their food was grown – and more peace of mind that farmers were using regenerative agricultural practices.

“Well-designed, inclusive, local food initiatives can have a positive impact,” said Enthoven. But she cautions that consumers can fall into a “local trap”, a term coined in a 2007 article by researchers at the University of Washington, if they “believe that the whole system should switch to local only, which is not per se more sustainable or inclusive”.

Although many local farms tout themselves as ethical alternatives to industrial agriculture, there’s no rule saying they have to be organic or worker-friendly. In fact, many small farms are exempt from paying the federal minimum wage and US Occupational Safety and Health Administration safety oversight and investigations.

Local farms can be important alternatives, especially when there are disruptions in supply chains, as occurred at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. But “we need a diversity of scale in our production system across product types,” said Hamm, especially as we look at ways to feed 8 billion people in the era of climate crisis.

Elizabeth WeiseDoyle Rice

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/06/07/see-wildfire-smoke-map-of-us-canada/70293572007/

USA TODAY

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Canada is on fire. On Tuesday there were more than 400 wildfires burning across the country, 238 of them out-of-control. Smoke and unhealthy air quality levels from the conflagration have blanketed multiple Canadian provinces, much of the Great Lakes region and parts of the northeastern United States.

While forest fires are a natural part of the ecosystem of Canada’s boreal forests, the size, ferocity and number of fires this year is decidedly abnormal. Most of the country is expected to be under high to extreme risk for much of the wildfire season, which stretches from May to September.

“Climate change is real and having a huge impact on Canadians right now with forest fires burning across the country,” tweeted Catherine McKenna, Canada’s former climate minister.

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On Monday Canada’s minister for emergency preparedness, Bill Blair, said the nation is seeing images of fires that “are some of the most severe ever witnessed in Canada.”

Here’s what to know:

How is smoke from the Canada fires affecting US air quality?

On Tuesday the federal AirNow fire and smoke map listed Albany, NY; Bennington, Vermont; Hartford, Conn.; and parts of New York City as “UNHEALTHY” and advised residents to “reduce activity or consider going indoors.”

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Due to the smoke in the air, “children and older adults, as well as people with heart or lung disease, should reduce prolonged or heavy exertion,” the weather service in Albany, New York, warned. “Exposure to elevated levels of fine particles such as wood smoke can increase the likelihood of respiratory symptoms in sensitive individuals and aggravate heart or lung disease.”

Canada wildfire smoke creates eerie glowing sunrises, lower temps in US

The smoky skies have helped reduce temperatures across much of the mid-Atlantic. Due to an area of low pressure that’s hovering offshore, along with an area of high pressure over Canada, a northerly flow of air was funneling the smoke south into the U.S. from Canada, AccuWeather said. This was keeping temperatures cooler than average, as the smoke filters out the blazing June sunshine.For example, the weather service in Washington, D.C., said in an online forecast discussion Tuesday that “temperatures this morning have been running 5-8 degrees cooler than forecast due to the smoke in the atmosphere.”

The smoke is even giving the sky, sun and moon some unusual colors.  

In addition to the milky, hazy skies, the wildfire smoke has created strange visual appearances of the sun and moon. Tuesday morning, the smoke “transformed the morning sunrise across parts of the East into an orange, photo-worthy haze,” AccuWeather reported.

US Air Quality Index

https://www.usatodaynetworkservice.com/tangstatic/html/usat/sf-q1a2z323ad14e2.min.html

Why are there so many fires in Canada?

Rising temperatures, prolonged droughts and changing rain patterns are making many of North America’s forests more prone to fire. Add on top of that the fact that temperatures at higher latitudes are increasing more than at low latitudes and it makes for horrific and historic levels of destruction.

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“We’re seeing events that are unknown in the historical record,” said Robert Scheller, a professor of forestry at North Carolina State University. “It’s hard to talk about without painting a grim picture.”

“It has been record-breakingly hot and dry across much of central and western Canada and now in recent days across eastern Canada as well,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Conditions there are “highly anomalous,” Swain said. Typically early to mid-spring would be the peak of seasonal dryness, with late spring and summer rains coming later and causing northern forests to “green up” and become less prone to fire. “So far this year that green up has been attenuated because it’s so dry and so warm,” he said.

Is climate change to blame for the fires?

While it’s impossible to say that any one fire or any one season is specifically linked to an increasingly warm planet, the trends show a strong signal, said Scheller.

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READ MORE:Latest climate change news from USA TODAY

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“We have unusually dry conditions and heat pulses in Canada,” he said.

That fits with data showing temperatures are rising faster in higher latitudes. In January, Howard Diamond, NOAA’s climate science program manager, said the global rise in temperature is unmistakable. “In some parts of the world, particularly at the higher latitudes towards the poles, the warming is much more accelerated.”

Wildfire, smoke map for US, Canada

https://www.usatodaynetworkservice.com/tangstatic/html/usat/sf-q1a2z323ad14e2.min.html

See more wildfire and smoke information and data here.

How a ‘hot drought’ is helping fuel the fires

Conditions in Canada are an example of something that has come to be called “hot droughts,” Scheller said.

“It’s not just lack of precipitation, it’s lack of precipitation plus these higher temperatures that really dry the soil and fuels out.”

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There have always been heat waves and there have always been droughts. What climate change adds is increased variability and increasing extremes. So in Canada, there are not only increased odds of drought but also increased odds of heat waves.

“If you roll the dice and they both come up, then you’ve got a hot drought,” Scheller said.

Does this mean the US fire season will be bad too?

Canada’s bad fire season won’t necessarily be repeated in the United States, thanks to different weather patterns further south.

There could also be a difference between higher and lower elevations, said Swain. Especially in California, which had seen heavy rain and snow in the previous six months, the legacy of the wet winter should mean a milder-than-average fire season in the mountains.

“This may be a year where there’s more fire risk in the valleys than the mountain peaks throughout the West,” he said.

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Lots of rain has meant plants and chaparral have grown extraordinarily well. “People have reported waist- or shoulder-high grass and brush this year when in some cases it was barely ankle high in the drought,” he said.

That means there’s a lot more fuel to burn this year than in previous years. Fire danger could emerge in July and August, possibly peaking in August and October depending on when the winter rains arrive.

US weather warnings

https://www.usatodaynetworkservice.com/tangstatic/html/usat/sf-q1a2z323ad14e2.min.html

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