Exposing the Big Game

Forget Hunters' Feeble Rationalizations and Trust Your Gut Feelings: Making Sport of Killing Is Not Healthy Human Behavior

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Tag Archives: animal-rights

Hollywood’s long history of animal cruelty

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“Luck’s” horse injury-related cancellation shows how far the film industry has come in treating non-human stars

When HBO’s “Luck” was canceled after a third horse died during production, it was natural to ask what was going on. Were animals being abused? Were people being careless?

The truth was nothing was that simple or savage. Apparently the horses were being treated well, with greater care than actual working racehorses. The third horse was reportedly in good health and high spirits the day it died. It was in such spirits that it reared up as horses sometimes do. This time it fell over backward, and landed on its head. Just an accident. All you can blame is the fragile frame of the thoroughbred horse, which was created for racing.

But that didn’t keep the show from being canceled – or critics from speaking out. Even before the third horse death, PETA charged that “two dead horses in a handful of episodes exemplify the dark side of using animals in television, movies, and ads.” Like all filming in the U.S., “Luck” was shot under supervision of the American Humane Association’s Film & TV Unit, the people who certify that “No animal was harmed in the making” of a film or TV show. (That’s a statement about animal welfare, not animal rights. If you don’t think animals should be filmed for entertainment at all, you’re not going to like AHA. Founded in 1877, it also promotes the welfare of children.)

Moreover, this latest incident shows just how much the treatment of animals has changed in Hollywood since the motion picture industry began.

The early days were rough. Take Thomas Edison’s elephant electrocution as a starting point. Topsy, like the producers of “Luck,” was charged with causing three deaths. The third was a cruel trainer who tried to feed her a lighted cigarette. Naturally, she killed him. Edison electrocuted Topsy with alternating current to show how dangerous it was, part of his feud with Nicola Tesla, and released “Electrocuting an Elephant” (1903). This seems unfair and crass to most people today, but the idea was to find the most merciful way to kill Topsy.

Beginning in the 1920s the motion-picture industry boomed, developing new genres as it went. In those days you could do almost anything to an animal (or an actor, for that matter). As many as 100 horses died in the making of the 1926 version of “Ben Hur.” Early Hollywood was an anarchic world, with upstart production companies launching grandiose projects on every side. Filmmakers did whatever struck them as a great idea.

With the advent of sound in 1927 profits took off. The studio system arose, concentrating filmmaking in a handful of dictatorially efficient corporations employing thousands and turning out movies at a tremendous rate. Animal actors were part of the process. Dramas, comedies, adventure stories, musicals, biographies – all would use animals, but the genre that used the most was the western.

The popularity of westerns was particularly hard on horses. Westerns were a staple in ’20s and ’30s Hollywood, and then boomed in the 1940s. In the early days, people were more familiar with horses, more attuned to the dangers of a runaway team, or the dangers of a horse and rider falling. Directors showed lots of falls. They used pitfalls, or tripwires to make horses fall, and there were also some stunt horses, who would fall at a signal. Trained horses jumped through windows or through flames. They leapt over wagons. They rampaged through saloons. All this was at the regular cost of injury or death.

Sometimes individual horses became known, and they were protected because of their fame, and because the actors loved them. Western star William S. Hart had a famous pinto, Fritz. Beautifully trained, Fritz would fall on command, lie down to act as a shield in a gunfight, even play scenes with a monkey. “Singer Jim McKee” (1924) had a scene in which Hart rode Fritz off a cliff into a gorge, but the actor didn’t want to risk Fritz, or a stunt horse, so a fake Fritz was constructed. Hart was filmed galloping to the edge on Fritz, at which point, on cue, the horse did a fall to one side. Then he was led away and replaced by the fake Fritz, held up with wire. When the wires were cut, the two toppled into the gorge. Hart was “badly shaken” by the fall, wrote Petrine Day Mitchum in “Hollywood Hoofbeats,” but once edited, the footage of falling man and “horse” was chillingly spectacular – so much so that the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Organization, aka the Hays Office, called Hart in to explain why he had been so cruel to Fritz.

Fritz was one of the exceptions to the rule. Most Hollywood horses were less famous, less recognizable, and often disposable. In 1939 two horses were killed in the filming of “Northwest Mounted Police” and two more in “Jesse James.” The horses in “Jesse James” were wearing movie blinkers with eyes painted on them. Unable to see, the horses had no idea they were running off a 75-foot cliff over white water until it was too late. The footage was impressive, the stuntman was well-paid, and the horses were dead.

This was the single biggest turning point in the history of Hollywood’s treatment of animals. Word about the deaths got out and there was a tremendous furor. In reaction to the outcry, the Hays Office worked with the AHA to write guidelines for animal performances. Starting in 1940, the AHA was granted access to sets. The Hays Office, well known for prissy extremes such as insisting that marital bedrooms feature twin beds and that Betty Boop dress more modestly, also banned apparent animal cruelty. Films were submitted to the office before release to get a certificate of approval and often changes were demanded before a certificate was issued.

In 1968 the Hays Code was dumped, mostly because it was ridiculous. Now you could have actors curse. You could ridicule the clergy. Married couples could be shown in the same bed. It was good news for the movies, but not for animal welfare. The end of the Hays Code contributed to the rise of the New Hollywood, a golden age of moviemaking. Younger filmmakers were creating realistic and daring movies, with more subtlety and less dependence on formula, contributing to a cinematic renaissance and a move toward realism and location shooting — and, sadly, more problems with animals.

More: http://www.salon.com/2012/04/02/hollywoods_long_history_of_animal_cruelty/

No One is Free While Others Are Oppressed

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Written by Jace Kai

June 27, 2015 at 3:28pm

Congrats to gays in America- you’re now able to endure the plight of marriage and serve the flesh of tortured animals at your wedding like every other entitled American. So glad your ‘suffering’ is over. And before everyone gets all whiny pissy pants on me, let me remind all that since the dawn of this country and even before, every human being has had a far better life than that of the ones suffered by animals due to human interaction and cruelty, and while everyone is dancing around in their rainbow undies, animals are sinking deeper into hell. Every black, white, asian, hispanic, male, female, gay, straight, transgender, jewish, muslim, christian and atheist; every fat person, skinny person, healthy person, sick person, free citizen and even incarcerated prisoner has been able to live with far more rights and freedoms at their lowest than animals have ever had the luxury of at their highest. Even the most sadistic of serial killers in solitary confinement are able to turn around and move their own limbs should they wish to do so, but that is not the case for billions of innocent animals born into humanity’s evil grasp. We turn their skin into shoes that we walk through the mud with. We turn their fat into soap to wash our asses with. We turn their menstruation into breakfast to slowly clog our arteries. We turn their fur into ridiculous looking coats to keep us warm. We turn their newborn babies into nothing more than a midnight snack. Have lesbians ever had to endure being skinned alive and turned into jerky for some redneck trucker to snack on? I think not. Billions upon billions of animals are born into slavery every year. Billions of animals as loving and intelligent as any dog or human child are born into a world where they are raped and beaten and viciously killed within a fraction of their natural life. Billions of animals who never once know the warmth of sunshine on their face or the softness of grass under their feet. Billions of animals who have their babies stolen and beaten to death right before their very eyes, all to satisfy the stupidly ego driven blood lust of humanity. And yet every day there is still some human complaining about THEY don’t have enough rights. The world will stop what they’re doing to protest the waving a flag, or unite to march in a parade to wave more flags and still the stomping of the feet never ends. We’re living in a country that is actively making and vehemently enforcing new laws which protect animal abusers and criminalize the few people who risk their own safety to bring such crimes to light. We’re living in a country that promotes the continued slavery, torture and slaughter of billions of animals every year in order to keep it’s own people sick and unhealthy while destroying the land, sea and air we all need to survive. We’re living in a country that keeps it’s people stupid in order to make them more easily misled by every lie thrown at them, particularly in the dietary department. We’re living in a country where an individual smoking a plant gets thrown in jail for 10+ years but a corporation that brutally rapes and slaughters millions of animals every week gets government subsidies like they’re heroes. Humans are all about ‘me me me’ and never ‘them them them’, and it’s that ego that makes America, as well as every other country far more shit than sunshine. The death of eight humans turns the country upside down but the death of billions of animals is just ‘business as usual’. Has a life with the inability to legally say “I do” or cast a vote for your favorite crooked shitmouthed politician really been comparable to even ONE day of living in the sick hell that factory animals endure? It’s all about the human ego wanting whatever it can get its hands on and then when they do, they want something more, like a kid who constantly gets new toys then gets bored with it by the next day and cares nothing for those who’ve never and will never have any toys at all. Mind you, this has nothing to do with me being a straight white male either because like many people who actually give a damn like myself, my entire existence is pure shit from dusk till dawn, and that’s fine. I speak only for the animal rights, not for my own. Go ahead and take away my ‘right to vote’ , because I can’t think of the last time there was ever a candidate worth voting for and elections are as fixed as a carnival bottle game anyway – take away my ‘right to get married’, because monogamy is about as natural as a 10 pound GMO tomato and almost always ends up in divorce, resentment or just giving up & settling either through sheer laziness or ‘for the kids’ – but don’t blow this happy “love wins” victory smoke up my ass while the only living beings in this country that don’t belong behind bars are the overwhelming majority that are – the animals. Gay or straight, a person knows nothing of love or compassion while there’s a corpse on their plate and I will continue to have zero ‘respect’ for any person, of any race, of any gender, of any sexual orientation, that willingly contributes their money towards the evil human empire over the innocent animal kingdom. I’m sure the 10,000 pigs who were stabbed in the eye with a pitchfork since I started writing this statue give a good god damn that Joe & Bob can have that festive wedding they always wanted now, maybe even catered with their flesh. Any non-vegan holding up a sign for ‘gay rights’ or ‘feminist wawa’ or ‘save the environment’ needs to sit down and take a good look at just how good they have actually have it and maybe try putting a little more effort into being a voice the the voiceless first and foremost, because as Leo Tolstoy said, “As long as there are slaughter houses there will always be battlefields.” Even if caring about non-humans is too much to ask of most shitty humans, remember that factory farming is the number one polluter and destroyer of the environment, so when all the water is too filthy to drink and the air is too polluted to breathe and the land is too toxic to yield crops, don’t expect that ring on your finger to save you.

Why I’m An Animal Rights Activist When There Is So Much Human Suffering In The World

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https://www.thedodo.com/why-im-an-animal-lover-1207140226.html?xrs=RebelMouse_fb#

by Tracey Narayani Glover

Before I was an animal rights activist, I was a budding human rights activist. While in law school, I helped victims of domestic violence obtain personal protection orders. I studied human rights and refugee law, participated in an asylum clinic, spent all my summer legal internships working with refugee organizations and focused primarily on helping women who were victims of gender-based persecution and violence such as honor crimes, forced genital mutilation, sex-trafficking, and rape.

My first client let me touch the shrapnel that was embedded under the skin in her knee after the Taliban had bombed her village in Afghanistan and killed most of her family. I also represented men when they were in need, like the gentle Congolese man who had been tortured, and had the marks on his body to prove it, because of dubious ties to the wrong political party.

Refugees and victims of gender based violence are an incredibly vulnerable and deserving group of humans. Many of them have no family, no country. Many live their lives in fear. Without the help of international aid groups and non-governmental organizations, they are at constant risk of exploitation, abuse, persecution, homelessness, and death. And yet, I have chosen to dedicate myself and my life to the animals.

I’m sure every animal activist has been challenged on this point: “How can you waste your time on animals when there are so many humans suffering?!” “Why don’t you start with the humans, and when all of our problems are fixed, then you can help animals?”

Of course this is the dominant mentality, based on a presumed superiority of humans, so much so that the slightest harm to a human is often seen to outweigh a tremendous harm to an animal. Given that the capacity to suffer is in no way limited to human beings, this bias in favor of humans is simple prejudice, favoring those we perceive as similar over those we perceive as different and therefore inferior, the hallmark of all discrimination and oppression.

For years I felt paralyzed as I looked out at the world with all of its suffering.

I desperately wanted to help but didn’t know how I could possibly choose between helping the people in third world countries living in extreme poverty, and the millions of children under the age of five dying every year from malnutrition, or the victims of ethnic and religious wars that so brutally claim the lives of innocents at any given time in modern history, genocides like that in Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur, atrocities taking place right now in Libya, Syria and Yemen. Millions of mostly women and girls are bought and sold into the world of sex trafficking every year to endure unspeakable crimes. And then there are the animals being used for painful and often cruel experimentation in laboratories, the fur-bearing animals like the playful foxes who are killed by anal electrocution so as not to damage their fur or the Chinese raccoon dogs who are routinely skinned alive in order to make knock off UGG boots or for the cheap fur trim on our winter coats .[1]

But the number of all of these animals combined is a drop in the bucket compared to the 55 billion farmed animals we kill every year for food. Fifty five billion animals. The entire global human population is about 7 billion, and we kill 55 billion animals every year for food. Each and every one of those fifty five billion was an individual with the capacity to have bonded with family and friends and to have led a joyful life like the rescued pigs seen in this video but who instead led a life of intense misery and often sadistic exploitation before enduring the terror and pain of slaughter.

All of these human and nonhuman beings suffer terribly. All of them are worthy of our compassion. I have always wanted to help them all. I still do. But the reason I choose to dedicate the majority of my time to advocating for nonhuman animals rather than all of those deserving humans is that we as a society all basically agree on human rights.

When I say we as a society, I do not mean the moral outliers of the international community like members of ISIS, or those in our own society like rapists or serial killers, but those who represent the dominant ethic in the world community, the law abiding members of our society and the international community. And according to that dominant ethic, it is wrong to abuse woman and children. It is wrong to murder innocent men. When we see humans who are starving or being exploited, raped, kidnapped, murdered or tortured, we believe it is wrong. Most governmental bodies around the world, non-government organizations (NGOs), and individuals agree that it is wrong to cause intense physical or emotional pain and suffering to human beings. We criminalize such harm, and we punish those who commit these crimes.

The same cannot be said of animals, especially not farmed animals, whose abuse is accepted by the same moral community that rejects the abuse of humans.

Even those of us who shower our dogs and cats with affection do so while sitting down to feast on a meal comprised of the body parts of equally sentient beings whose entire lives were spent in suffering. As a society, we still do not see what we’re doing to animals as wrong. While all animals in our society are still legally considered property, at least abusing dogs and cats is now a felony in all fifty states. However, what is felony cruelty if done to a dog or cat is perfectly legal if done to an animal we have designated as a food animal.[2]

We not only kill 10 billion land animals in the US every year for food, (55 billion globally) it would not be an exaggeration to say that we torture them for the duration of their short lives before we kill them. We confine them in tiny cages that drive them literally insane. [3] We take babies away from their mothers and murder them by the millions (e.g., we kill 260 million baby chicks every year because they are a “by-product” of the egg industry).[4] Dairy cows are impregnated on what the industry calls a “rape rack” in order to ensure the cow will continue to lactate and provide milk that will be denied to her baby, who will be taken away at birth. If that baby is female, she will become a dairy cow and like her mother, she too will be forcibly impregnated, and then after giving birth to four or five babies and milked so much the odds are she will suffer from a painful udder infection called mastitis, she will be slaughtered at a fraction of her natural lifespan when her body becomes too depleted to continue producing milk at the volume modern agribusiness demands. If the baby the dairy cow births is a male, he will either be killed on the spot, or turned into veal (i.e. confined all alone in a dark pen and fed an iron deficient diet to make him anemic because consumers prefer the taste and color of meat that comes from anemic babies). [5]

Nonhuman animals are conscious, intelligent, emotional beings.

If we have ever lived with a dog or cat, we probably know this from experience. If we need proof, we can ask the scientific community. In 2012, a prominent international group of cognitive neuroscientists, neuropharmacologists, neurophysiologists, neuroanatomists and computational and neuroscientists gathered at The University of Cambridge and declared that nonhuman animals are conscious — meaning they can think, feel, perceive, and respond to the world in much the same way as humans. [6]

It is hard to measure pain. Usually with humans we just ask them how much pain they feel and they tell us. But when they can’t tell us, we look for external signs of pain such as trying to get away from the source of pain, vocalizing (yelling, crying), grimacing or shaking to name a few. Nonhuman animals demonstrate all of these same signs. If we can bear not to look away, it is plain to see that the egg laying hens crammed into battery cages, or the sows confined to gestation creates so small that can’t turn around, or the dairy cows being dragged to slaughter because they are too lame to walk all suffer tremendously.

Just a few hundred years ago, Rene Descartes, the father of western philosophy, strapped living dogs to tables and cut them open without anesthesia believing that their howls were like the sounds made by machines, no more indicative of pain than was the screech made by the machine’s metal parts. Hard to imagine, that. And yet today even on so called humane farms, we routinely subject cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys and other farmed animals to mutilation without anesthesia.[7] If we think what Descartes did was wrong, how can we possibly condone what we do to farmed animals every single day? There is no reason to believe that a dog feels more pain than a pig or for that matter that a human feels more pain that a dog. Some, like evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, think non humans may even feel pain more acutely than humans do. [8] In fact we are so certain that nonhuman animals do feel pain like humans do that we subject animals like mice to pain tests in labs in order to better understand human pain.[9]

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that at least a million chickens and turkeys are boiled alive every year because the production line is so fast that their throats haven’t been slit by the time they get to the tanks of scalding water into which they are dropped, only to be boiled alive.[10] More than 1 million pigs die in transport every year before they even get to the slaughterhouse.[11] They are packed in so tightly they cannot move, and can barely breathe. They die of suffocation, overheating, being trampled.

I became an animal rights advocate not because I don’t care about humanity, but because so few people care about the nonhuman animals.

The suffering of animals we use for experimentation, for fur, for our food is shocking to the conscience. Watch one undercover slaughterhouse video and we might think the vile cruelty we see is an anomaly. Watch hundreds and hundreds of these videos and we begin to realize that the disdain with which the workers treat the animals, kicking chickens like footballs,[12] kicking and stomping turkeys destined for Thanksgiving dinner,[13] slamming piglets onto the concrete floor and leaving them to die,[14] is not anomalous but is the norm.

The degree and scale of the suffering involved in animal agriculture in particular is beyond anything humanity has ever endured.

Polish-born Jewish-American author Isaac Bashevis Singer famously said “In relation to … [the animals], all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.” This refers of course to the Nazi concentration camp where close to a million Jews were exterminated in gas chambers. The first time I ever heard the comparison made between factory farming and the Holocaust was by someone who lost most of his family in the Holocaust and who himself is a survivor of it. Alex Hershaft is an animal rights pioneer who has said that his experience in the Holocaust not only contributed to his becoming a vegan and an animal rights activist, it is the cause of it. During a recent trip to Israel, he had this to say in an interview: “The Jewish Holocaust is a unique event in human history; and the best way to honor the Holocaust is to learn from it and to fight all forms of oppression. We may have been victorious in World War II, but the struggle against oppression and injustice is far from over. For me, the Holocaust isn’t a tool in the struggle, but an experience that shaped my personality and my values, made me who I am today, and drove me to fight all forms of oppression, including the oppression of the weakest creatures, the animals.” [15]

In his latest book, “The Most Good You Can Do,” one of the modern world’s pre-eminent philosophers of ethics, Peter Singer, argues that if we are interested in doing the most good we can do in the world, that is, in reducing the most suffering, there are three main areas that demand our attention. These are saving the environment, ending extreme poverty, and helping the nonhumans animals, especially farmed animals.

In addition to its importance for the nonhumans, vegan advocacy goes beyond helping nonhuman animals. Vegan advocacy seeks to raise consciousness and awareness about the ways in which we treat other beings. The animal rights movement does not just advocate for a select group of beings, it advocates for principles truly universal in their scope.

Animal rights advocates don’t just advocate for the rights of chimps or cows or fish. They advocate for a more compassionate world for all beings.

They bring awareness to structures of power that are oppressive and based on exploitation, that harm nonhuman animals, humans, and the environment. Veganism is rooted in the concept of ahimsa, a Sanskrit word meaning non-harm to all sentient beings as well as the living environment. It is a movement that above all values the reduction of suffering, and calls on us all to bring more awareness into the ways in which we relate with all beings, the nonhumans as well as humans. Fundamentally, vegans advocate for the values that all social justice movements uphold. They focus on the nonhumans, but what they are really advocating for is a society in which no sentient being is used as a means to another’s end. They are fighting for the elimination of all forms of prejudice and oppression. They work to build a world where no sentient being is discriminated against based on morally irrelevant qualities, where all beings are valued and respected, where none are enslaved or tortured, where all beings are allowed the freedom to thrive and pursue their own innate potential for happiness and joy. As long as our society is built on a foundation of brutality, oppression and exploitation of billions of sentient beings, how can we ever hope to have true justice or compassion within human society?

Being an animal rights activists is not about limiting our compassion to nonhumans, it’s about extending our circle of compassion to include all beings who can suffer.

In the world we live, there is no comparison to the enormity of the suffering endured by the nonhuman animals, especially those enslaved by the meat, dairy, and egg industries. I am an animal advocate because the screams of billions of animals remain unheard. I am an animal advocate because no being should suffer, and the suffering of nonhuman animals is so intense, so constant, so massive, and so widespread. I am an animal advocate because humanity is still in denial that it is our own daily choices that are responsible for the immense suffering of a truly unfathomable number of conscious, emotional, sentient beings. I am an animal advocate quite simply because it is the animals who need me the most.

[1] “Inside the Chinese fur farms which breed ‘raccoon dogs’ in tiny cages and skin them alive to make luxury coats sold in the West” Dan Bloom, The Daily Mail, Feb. 14 2015, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2867219/Inside-Chinese-fur-farms-breed-raccoon-dogs-tiny-cages-skin-alive-make-luxury-coats-sold-West.html

[2] http://aldf.org/resources/advocating-for-animals/farmed-animals-and-the-law/

[3] http://woodstocksanctuary.org/learn-3/factory-farmed-animals/pigs/

[4] https://arcforallsentientbeings.wordpress.com/2015/04/07/vegans-are-so-extreme-or-what-could-possibly-be-wrong-with-eggs-and-dairy-part-i/

[5] http://www.humanesociety.org/issues/confinement_farm/facts/veal.html

[6] http://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConsciousness.pdf

[7] “Deciphering “Humane” Labels & Loopholes”, Woodstock Animal Sanctuary, http://woodstocksanctuary.org/learn-3/the-humane-farming-myth/humane-free-range/

[8] http://boingboing.net/2011/06/30/richard-dawkins-on-v.html

[9] “Behavioral Measures of Pain Thresholds” Michael S. Minett, Kathryn Quick, John N. Wood, Current Protocols in Mouse Biology, Sept. 2011, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9780470942390.mo110116/abstract

[10] “USDA plan to speed up poultry-processing lines could increase risk of bird abuse,” Washington Post, Kimberly Kindy, Oct. 29, 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/usda-plan-to-speed-up-poultry-processing-lines-could-increase-risk-of-bird-abuse/2013/10/29/aeeffe1e-3b2e-11e3-b6a9-da62c264f40e_story.html

[11] “Research Looks at Transport Losses,” Feedstuffs Apr. 17 2006.

[12] “Chick-fil-A Suppliers Caught Torturing Animals On Hidden Camera By Mercy For Animals” Nov. 19, 2014 http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/chick-fil-a-suppliers-caught-torturing-animals-on-hidden-camera-by-mercy-for-animals-283166311.html

[13] http://www.butterballabuse.com/readmore.php

[14] http://pigcruelty.mercyforanimals.org/

[15] http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4655781,00.html

What More Can We Say to Hunters?

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Yesterday a loyal reader sent the following comment in response to my post, Top Ten Retorts to Hunter Fallacies: “Trying to talk with people who won’t listen takes us nowhere. They are going to hunt and their mythology and ideology that excuse the killing are the voices they hear.”

Well, I agree—I’ve known that for a long time now. The fact is I never really write anything in hopes of changing hunters or talking them out of their blood sport.

I know that killing animals is too much in their blood (so to speak) to expect them to change for the better. As if to prove this point, a typical hunter tried (unsuccessfully) to leave this comment to a post about a man shooting and killing his grandson in a hunting accident. It started out like so many others, with “You people…” (a dead giveaway that it’s going to be from a hunter, and therefore unworthy of approval): “…are fucking idiots. This grandfather is suffering the worst tragedy of his natural life, and you people make it into a gun control issue. How do you think you all are able to go out and eat a steak dinner, or a chicken wrap, or any other meat product? Animals were put on earth to feed humans, period. Get your heads out of your asses, morons!!!”

If killing their own grandsons is not reason enough for them to swear off hunting, I don’t know what else to say to them.

Call it preaching to the choir, but the things I write, like the Top Ten Retorts to Hunter Fallacies are in fact either to inform or entertain my fellow advocates.

Not that they need to be educated. But the magnanimous few occasionally may need affirmation or a ready list of replies to the same old, worn out hunter dogma that have a little more thought behind them than, “Get your heads out of your asses, morons!”

Text and Wildlife Photography ©Jim Robertson, 2015. All Rights Reserved

Text and Wildlife Photography ©Jim Robertson, 2015. All Rights Reserved

 

URGENT! Frogs to Be Impaled for School Fundraiser!

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american-bullfrog© iStock.com/Sir_Eagle

“Gigging” is an especially barbaric form of hunting that involves stabbing small animals through the body with pitchfork-like spears called “gigs,” causing victims to endure slow, agonizing deaths from shock, organ failure, or blood loss. Despite a public outcry, a Tennessee Farm Bureau Federation program in DeKalb County is encouraging students and other members of the community to gig up to 15 frogs each as part of its annual “Giggin’ for Grads” fundraiser to benefit one graduating high school senior. The event is scheduled for June 19, so your voice is desperately needed today!

Please urge Tennessee Farm Bureau Federation and DeKalb County School District officials to put a stop to this exceedingly inhumane event, and then share this alert widely. Remind them that there are many ways to raise money that don’t involve cruelty to animals.

Polite comments can be directed to:

  • Danielle Collins, Interim Director of Schools
    DeKalb County School District
    615-215-2116
    dcollins@k12tn.net (or please click here to send an e-mail)http://www.peta.org/action/action-alerts/urgent-frogs-impaled-school-fundraiser/

Remember trying to walk home from school?

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https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/8521237-remember-trying-to-walk-home-from-school

by Susie Duncan Sexton

description A Yale professor, who spoke of teaching the -ISMS (racism, ageism, sexism), said that never did he have more dissension or hatefulness issuing from students than when he attempted to teach SPECIESISM.

He believed the collective guilt of having already eaten meat for a lifetime and laughing at animals and never stopping to face the reality of all the abuse other species suffer at the hands of humans is the primary reason humans become so stubbornly heinous. Yet, some of us become compassionate and wish to change. We are the true brave hearts. The others are cowards playing with murderous weapons. Nothing but cowards.

description

And as usual they – those who want to make an ugly point of their God(?)-given “dominion” over, well, everything, it seems – are once again taking their vileness and coarseness and ignorance out on the innocent – even stepping it up. Pretty odd stuff – sociopathic and psychopathic and bizarre. A bully is a bully is a bully.

Those types are as nuts toward humans as they are animals, in spite of any insincere attempts (on their part) at denial of such. Often…usually always…the swaggering grows due to gang-like behavior. Humans trying to impress other humans and to be accepted in some nightmarish club or other. Just unbelievable to observe.

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But so goes history….ethnic cleansings, world wars, crusades, feeding ____ to lions, gladiator contests, rodeos, bull-fights, turtle tossing, quail shooting, and ………………… and all manner of kinky, mean, smug, creepy, stupid stuff.

Remember trying to walk home from school? And the little cliques that lay in wait? Well, those kids never change. And they seldom seem to pay for their nasty behavior. They manage to raise their little fists and display their Wal-Mart weapons in photo ops because maybe they really always wanted to be movie stars or quarterbacks or cowboys or roller derby dolls or something?

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And they should have been disciplined by parents (who often maneuvered their way on to school boards) or teachers (who often wish to be popular with the meanest kids so that their work day goes smoother!).

C’mon 99% can relate to the horrors of the public school system then and now. Same old same old. And look where we all are today…putting up with the ugly fireworks I just described and whatever else the entitled want to impose on the rest of us.

______________________

Secrets of an Old Typewriter Stories from a Smart and Sassy Small Town Girl by Susie Duncan Sexton

More Secrets of an Old Typewriter Misunderstood Gargoyles and Overrated Angels by Susie Duncan Sexton

Read about movies and nostalgia, animal issues and sociopolitical concerns all discussed in my book Secrets of an Old Typewriter and its follow-up Misunderstood Gargoyles and Overrated Angels – print and ebook versions of both are available on Amazon (click the title).

The books are also carried by these fine retailers: Ann Arbor’s Bookbound and Common Language; Columbia City’s North Side Grille and Whitley County Historical Museum; and Fort Wayne’s The Bookmark.

And you can download from iTunes.

Meet other like-minded souls at my facebook fan page

Visit my author website at www.susieduncansexton.com

Join a great group of animal advocates Squawk Back: Helping animals when others can’t … Or Won’t

Animal Rights Activist Being Sent to Jail: “The Animals Have it Far Worse.”

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Animal Rights Activist Being Sent to Jail: “The Animals Have it Far Worse.”

Amber Canavan is spending the month of July in jail. Her crime? Entering a foie gras facility, where tens of thousands of ducks are intensively confined and force fed through metal pipes, and rescuing two of them.

Amber Canavan entered Hudson Valley Foie Gras to document and expose the cruelty

“We still live in a world where people who commit the abuses are victims and those who expose them are criminals,” said Ms. Canavan. “I don’t want to go to jail, but my time there will be a cakewalk compared to what animals are forced to endure in foie gras factories.”

Ducks cower in fear at the side of their cage at Hudson Valley Foie Gras (photo: still shot from footage taken by Amber Canavan)

In 2011, Ms. Canavan and another activist whose identity she has protected paid a late night visit to Hudson Valley Foie Gras in upstate New York, the largest foie gras producer in the United States. While there, she documented the “deplorable” conditions in which the ducks are kept. The footage she captured was used in a foie gras exposé produced by the Animal Protection and Rescue League and narrated by actress Wendy Malick.

In February, the NY Times published a lengthy story about the incident, which linked to the video and informed readers about the “force feeding” required to produce this “controversial” dish. “I take comfort in the fact the NY Times article and the footage that I took have helped to expose the atrocities being committed against these animals,” said Ms. Canavan.

Excerpt from NY Times story about Amber Canavan and Hudson Valley Foie Gras

After several weeks of intensive care, the two ducks rescued by Ms. Canavan recovered from their injuries and are “flourishing” at a sanctuary, where they have access to fresh air, proper care and water for swimming. Ducks and geese are aquatic animals, but they have no access to water in foie gras factories.

Ducks are aquatic animals but have no access to water in foie gras factories. These two ducks were rescued by Amber Canavan.

Captain Paul Watson on LA Talk Radio June 10th

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Join our host Captain Paul Watson on LA Talk Radio June 10th for Sea Shepherd updates. We have my vegan pal and a great leader of the animal rights movement, and co-founder of SAEN, (Stop Animal Exploitation NOW!), Michael Budkie with breaking lab animals news. Join us, Yana Rusinovich, Paul’s wife and our Vegan corespondent and Ambassador of Galgos Ethique Europe, Shane Barbi of Barbi Twins and Jungle Jana, Wed, 11am http://www.latalkradio.com/Oceans.php, on State of the Oceans!

>Michael Budkie, A.H.T., http://www.animalliberationfront.com/…/In…/MichaelBudkie.htm) is the co-founder and Executive Director of Stop Animal Exploitation NOW! (SAEN), that works exclusively on the animal experimentation issue by successfully terminating research projects, forcing the USDA to take legal action against laboratories, and coordinating release of animals into sanctuaries. After witnessing the atrocities of animal experimentation during his education, he successfully ended a head injury experiment on cats at the University of Cincinnati that launched his career leading to positions with several national organizations before he co-founded SAEN in the mid-1990s. He has been published and he travels extensively, appearing on TV and radio programs to expose the truth about animal experimentation. For more about SAEN and Michael’s amazing work for animals go to: http://www.SAENonline.org twitter: https://twitter.com/SAENonline Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/officialSAEN

> Yana Rusinovish, Captain Paul Watson’s wife, is our “State of the Oceans” International Vegan host; Yana is a devoted vegan and avid animal activist that is a proud member of L214 http://www.l214.com/, The association L214 Ethique et Animaux , which is a French (non-profit) association for animal protection, governed by the 1901 Law. It was founded in 2008 by the collective “Stop Gavage” for the abolition of foie gras, which now continues its actions within L214.It is devoted to the welfare of the animals used to be consumed (meat, milk, eggs, and fish), putting into question the links between society and animals.
Yana is also the official ambassador for Galgos Ethique Europe https://www.facebook.com/galgos.ethiqueeurope
http://www.galgos-ethique-europe.eu/
Yana’s vegan group; VeganPower; informative tips and delicious recipes
https://www.facebook.com/groups/730532836982737/
http://about.me/yanarusinovich
twitter; @YanaRusinovich

>Jana Jungle; host
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jani-Schulz/405645412815106
twitter: @RainforestRadio.

>Barbi Twins; hosts https://www.facebook.com/thebarbitwins?fref=ts
twitter: @Barbi_Twins

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Bird flu could possibly affect humans

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why

http://www.abc17news.com/news/cdc-bird-flu-could-possibly-affect-humans/33427576

This week the CDC released a report expressing concerns about the H2N5 strain of avian flu possibly affecting humans.

For months the CDC has said it is not contagious to humans.

Dr. Dan Shaw at Mizzou’s Veterinary School said if someone were to contact H2N5 it would have to be inhaled.

He said this is dangerous because not only are poultry farms experiencing a mass infection of the virus, but people who handle waterfowl could possibly be at risk, as well.

“As far as human safety, waterfowl can get infected with the virus and they don’t tend to get that sick with it.  So, they could be a source of infection and when the fall migration comes back down the Central and Mississippi it is causing some concern,” said Shaw.

More:

http://www.abc17news.com/news/cdc-bird-flu-could-possibly-affect-humans/33427576

Shaw said hunters in Missouri should be concerned if they hunt geese or ducks.

He said people who handle the birds are at the highest risk for getting the virus, if it should mutate, which the CDC now says is a possibility.

“That would definitely be a way to get exposed to it and all the poultry companies advise their workers to give up waterfowl hunting or find a new job because they are so worried about the source,” said Shaw.