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Chasse aux phoques: L'opposition s'organise 2009-12-24 09:04:58 (Source: Radio-Canada) Des groupes opposés à la chasse aux phoques préparent l'offensive en vue des Jeux olympiques d'hiver, qui se tiendront en février prochain, à Vancouver. Plusieurs groupes opposés à la chasse aux phoques se préparent en vue des Jeux olympiques d'hiver, qui se tiendront en février prochain, à Vancouver. Ces derniers entendent profiter de l'attention médiatique internationale pour dénoncer cette chasse controversée. À l'heure qu'il est, l'opposition s'organise sur Internet. Les groupes de défense des animaux y présentent des images-chocs, sur fond de musique angoissante, de sorte à convaincre les internautes de faire pression sur le Comité international olympique et sur le gouvernement canadien pour que la chasse aux phoques soit abolie. ... http://nouvelles.sympatico.ca/Accueil/ContentPosting_SRC_grands_titres?newsitemid=458173&feedname=CBC_TOPSTORIES_V3_FR&show=False&number=10&showbyline=True&subtitle=&detect=&abc=abc&date=True

22/12/2009 Consultations de l’OMC : il est grand temps que le Canada mette l’UE au pied du mur en ce qui concerne sa loi sur les produits dérivés du phoque ... ... Coordonnateur Réseau des phoques et de la chasse au phoque Institut de la fourrure du Canada, "pour promouvoir l'utilisation durable et judicieuse de la ressource-fourrure du Canada" http://www.lepost.fr/article/2009/12/22/1854138_chasse-au-phoque-l-europe-incapable-d-expliquer-scientifiquement-son-boycott-a-l-omc.html

30,000 animals perish as ‘cargo ship’ sinks off Lebanon Dec 18, 2009 Nearly 30,000 animals – 10,224 sheep and 17,932 cattle – have reportedly drowned as the Panamanian-flagged ship Danny F II sank off the coast of Lebanon yesterday. The sinking of the Panamanian-flagged ship Danny F II has served as a harsh reminder of why the long distance transport of animals for slaughter is risky business. Several crew members from the ship are still missing, and rescue teams have described how they pulled "shocked, distraught and cold" survivors from the sea. Although the tragic loss to human life will naturally remain in focus in reports on this tragedy, we ask people to spare a thought for the nearly 30,000 cattle that have also perished, and whose suffering – both during the journey and with the accident – could have been avoided entirely. The cruelty of long distance transport Danny F II loading cattle in the Brazilian port of Vila do Conde bound for Lebanon. WSPAWSPA has been campaigning to get governments and stakeholders from all countries involved in the livestock trade to stop the long distance transport of live animals as this cruel practice results in poor animal welfare. Millions of animals suffer every year as they are transported for as long as 30 days in filthy and stressful conditions, only to be slaughtered at their destination. As Sofia Parente, Programs Manager for WSPA’s campaign on ending the long distance trade of animals for slaughter, says: “Previous WSPA investigations on the Danny F II and other similar cargo vehicles involved in the trade have shown how animals are packed tightly into the holds of ships, with limited access to food and water, suffering great distress, injuries and dehydration before they arrive at slaughterhouses at their destination. As many as 10 per cent of the animals can die during these journeys.” The alternatives The livestock trade can be easily replaced with chilled and frozen meat products derived from animals humanely slaughtered at their point of origin. Apart from significantly improving the welfare of the animals concerned, this move to chilled meat products would also bring economic, environmental and developmental benefits to countries at both ends of the trade. http://www.wspa.ca/latestnews/2009/30000_animals_perish_as_cargo_ship_sinks_off_lebanon.aspx

Last updated December 23, 2009 5:19 p.m. PT Man sentenced, fined for trafficking bear organs THE ASSOCIATED PRESS OLYMPIA, Wash. -- Wildlife detectives say investigations into the illegal trafficking of bear gall bladders have led to prison time for one man and a hefty fine for another. The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife says Wednesday that William A. Page, a meat cutter from Curlew, was sentenced to a year jail in Ferry County Superior Court after being convicted on six counts of unlawful trafficking in wildlife. Page, 63, was sentenced Dec. 18 and was also fined $3,000. Investigators say Page admitted buying 35 gall bladders in 2007 and 2008, including 17 from undercover officers. Investigators say some believe gall bladders have healing powers and can draw thousands of dollars on the black market. In a separate case, Jason Yon, 51, owner of JAX Market in Spokane, was fined $1,000 in Spokane County Superior Court on Dec. 22 for two felony convictions of illegally trafficking in wildlife. He was found guilty of purchase four gall bladders during an undercover investigation. http://www.seattlepi.com/local/6420ap_wa_bear_trafficking.html

Norm Phelps: In Praise of 'The New Welfarism' ...the pain generated by the recognition that eating animal products is profoundly evil is intense. Experiencing it, most people go into denial and lash out at the messenger.... Note: The following is the text—with minor editing by the author—of a talk delivered on June 13, 2009 to Their Lives Our Voices, an animal rights conference sponsored by Compassionate Action for Animals in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. --------------------------------- Since I am going to present a case for what is often considered a “moderate” point of view, I want to be clear at the outset that I am not a moderate on the subject of animal rights. Our treatment of nonhuman animals is profoundly immoral, and the goal of the animal rights movement must be nothing less than to establish worldwide a fully moral relationship between human beings and all other animals. A moral relationship to animals would have two elements. It would be based on moral parity between humans and nonhumans, and it would involve no human exploitation of other animals. These principles are elegantly captured in two old PETA slogans: “Where pain is concerned, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.” And, “Animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, or use in entertainment.” There’s Less Here than Meets the Eye The controversy between “abolitionists” and “new welfarists” is not at all about goals; it is entirely about strategy. Even worse, this dispute is not taking place between people who advocate one strategy and people who advocate a different, separate strategy. Both sides support abolitionist advocacy, and both sides agree that abolitionist advocacy, primarily in the form of vegan campaigns, is the heart and soul of the animal rights movement. Rather, the dispute is between activists who insist that everyone in the movement pursue abolitionist advocacy exclusively and activists who believe that abolitionist advocacy should be supplemented by reforms that ease the suffering of animals whom we cannot liberate in the foreseeable future, and by outreach to consumers who are not yet willing to make the move to veganism, but might be persuaded to reduce their consumption of animal products. To put it another way, it is between activists who want to impose their own rigid, ideologically based orthodoxy on the campaigns of the entire animal rights movement and those who want to take a more flexible and pragmatic approach to questions of strategy. The Hardest Sell in History To help us understand the need for multiple approaches to animal rights strategy, including so-called “welfarist” or “reformist” approaches, let’s consider some of the factors that make animal rights by far the hardest sell in the history of social justice movements. First: Animal exploitation is the most widespread and deeply entrenched form of injustice in the history of the human race. Animal exploitation has no boundaries in time or geography. We emerged from the shadows of the preliterate past with spear and bow in hand and livestock in captivity. There is no society known to history that did not enslave animals and kill them for food, fabric, labor, transportation, entertainment, religious sacrifice, and/or scientific knowledge. When we look at our own society in the present day, there is almost nowhere we can turn without seeing animal exploitation and murder. Let’s consider the most important area: food. The staples of the modern diet in the industrialized world are meat, eggs, and dairy. Supermarkets that do not sell animal products are nonexistent and restaurants that do not serve them are rare. Polls suggest that roughly ninety-four percent of the population of the United States and Western Europe eat meat, and about ninety-seven percent eat eggs and dairy. Even more seriously, meat, eggs, and dairy are the foods that resonate with us emotionally. Meat evokes images of strength and power, while vegetables seem wimpy and lacking in character. When we are ill, frightened, or depressed, we turn to meat, eggs, and dairy for comfort. The curative powers of chicken soup are legendary. When we go out to eat, it is meat that we look forward to; vegetables are merely an accompaniment. Fran Lebowitz, a New York writer celebrated for her trendy wit, observed that “Vegetables are interesting, but lack a sense of purpose without a good cut of meat.” Julia Child, who became a celebrity in America promoting French cuisine on television, was speaking for most people when she said, “I feel sorry for vegetarians because when they sit down at the table they never have anything to look forward to.” Meat is energy, drive, purpose, and success; it is what we want, while fruits and vegetables are merely the filler, the things our parents made us eat because “they’re good for you.” The emotional power of meat, eggs and dairy is multiplied because it is the material out of which so many of our defining rituals are constructed, from joyous family dinners during holidays to prayer breakfasts and power lunches, all of which are centered on meat (except in those elitist circles where the “health salad” for lunch is de rigueur). For most Americans, baseball games are unimaginable without hot dogs, and what suburban family can go without “cooking out” several times a summer—going into the backyard and grilling hot dogs, burgers, and steaks. Food is the centerpiece of our dating rituals; only on the radical fringes would “dinner and a movie,” not be expected to include meat. It is astounding to think about how many of those occasions that hold our happiest, most cherished memories and our fondest hopes and dreams (for career advancement, for true love, for the home team to win a championship) are centered upon food, and how universally that food is meat. Emotionally and culturally—which is to say, both as individuals and as a society—we are more deeply invested in animal slavery and slaughter than we ever were in the oppression of women or people of color. Second: Animal rights is the only social movement in history whose beneficiaries cannot participate in it and whose participants cannot benefit from it. History’s other social revolutions have typically drawn their momentum from the population that would benefit from success: women in the women’s movement, blacks in the American civil rights movement, the colonized peoples in the national liberation movements that followed World War II, gays and lesbians in the gay and lesbian rights movement, and working men and women in the labor movement. The animal rights movement has no access to the indomitably motivated and endlessly renewable resource that has been available to every other social justice movement—the victims themselves. In fact, its membership is drawn entirely from the ranks of the oppressors. Think of the challenge that the abolition movement would have faced if it had had to depend entirely on reformed slave owners for its activists. That is the challenge facing animal rights. Third: Most people believe that their health, happiness, and prosperity depend on the abuse and murder of animals. And they will fight to defend these against what they see as dangerous, hostile attacks by radical fanatics. For people who grew up eating meat, eggs, and dairy, they can be as hard to give up as any other addiction. Although there is no genuine physical benefit to eating animal products as opposed to plants—in fact, animal foods are actually harmful—there is a powerful psychological benefit in not having to deprive yourself of foods that you have learned from childhood to enjoy, to which so many of your happy memories are attached, and which serve as vehicles for your most valuable and pleasurable family, social, and business rituals. For most people, psychological benefit trumps physical benefit every time, which is why so many of us die of lung cancer, emphysema, cardiovascular disease, liver disease, and obesity related illnesses caused by our search for psychological comfort without regard to our physical wellbeing. Likewise, most people believe that their health and longevity depend on animal research. The benefits of animal research are sometimes real, more often imagined, but the relevant fact here is that the public is convinced that animal research holds the cure for everything from swine flu to AIDS to cancer. Everyone I know outside the animal protection community would be horrified at the idea of ending biomedical research on animals. They are counting on animal research to save them from the consequences of eating animal products. Fourth: All too many people predicate their self-worth on feeling superior to nonhuman animals. They fight tooth and nail to hang on to this sense of superiority and when it is challenged they feel insulted and devalued and they reject the message out of hand. The longing to feel superior to someone else is among the deepest, darkest urges of the human spirit—and one of the most difficult to root out. People will frequently endure poverty, suffering, and even face death for no better reason than to feel superior to someone else or some other group. Ancient Greeks felt superior to “barbarians.” Christians and Muslims feel superior to “infidels,” including each other. The rich feel superior to the poor. People with old money or old pedigrees feel superior to people with new money or no pedigree. Men feel superior to women. Whites feel superior to everybody. And everybody feels superior to animals. Animals are the inferiors of last resort, because when we acknowledge that their worth is equal to our own, there is no one left for anyone to feel superior to. And while this fact is rarely acknowledged by animal activists, this need to feel superior is one of the most important barriers to public acceptance of animal rights, just as it was one of the most important barriers to rights for women and people of color. And finally: When you recognize the justice of the animals’ cause, you understand for the first time that your life up until now has been based on immoral acts. A moment later, you realize that the same is true of your family and friends, and of nearly all the people whom you and our society respect and honor; their lives, like yours and mine, have been based on evil. American economist John Kenneth Galbraith is widely quoted as saying that “In the choice between changing ones mind and proving there's no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof.” This is nowhere more true than when we are challenged to change our minds about the morality of behavior of which our society approves, which we enjoy, and from which we believe we benefit. This is because it is urgently important to all of us to think of ourselves as moral people. There are few experiences more painful than acknowledging that our behavior is, in fact, immoral. And so, the pain generated by the recognition that eating animal products is profoundly evil is intense. Experiencing it, most people go into denial and lash out at the messenger. They refuse even to consider the question of animals’ rights because of the horror with which they would have to regard their own past life, and the lives of their parents, spouses, teachers, clergy, friends, and co-workers, not to mention their national leaders, their spiritual and philosophical mentors, and the people they admire in business, education, sports and entertainment. For this reason, abolitionist campaigns alone, unsupported by other strategies, will never reach most members of the public. Most people will reject them because of the intense emotional distress they cause. The public will have to be led gradually, indirectly, one logically inconsistent step at a time to this recognition of the evil that permeates our lives, our families, and our societies, so that it overtakes them before they can throw up their defenses. This process usually begins by drawing people’s attention to some atrocity for which they do not feel personally responsible. “Sure,” most people say, “I eat meat and eggs. But I don’t put chickens in battery cages or pigs in gestation crates. You can make pork chops and omelets without those things.” But once they acknowledge the cruelty of battery cages and gestation crates, it becomes harder to deny the cruelty of slaughterhouses. This first step commits them to feeling moral responsibility for animals, begins the process of breaking down their resistance, and paves the way for the next step. Most people are not like us. Most people are not activists for any cause, human or animal, and never will be. For most of us in the animal activist community, a switch flipped in our heads one day, and we could never see the world in the same way again. Our lives changed forever. But for most of the public, it does not work that way. They need to be brought along slowly, inch by inch. And the point to which we are able to bring one generation will be the starting point from which the next generation will set out. Until finally, we will have chipped away at speciesism to the point that we will be able to bring down the entire structure of animal slavery and slaughter. A Foolish Consistency “Abolitionists” have been seduced by a theory. And the theory that possesses them says that the means must always be logically consistent with the goal. This sounds reasonable, but it is simply not true. One-track activists are easing the pain of their own cognitive dissonance by adopting a consistency so rigid that it loses touch with the real world. Abstract theory is always consistent, the real world is messy and logically inconsistent. A logically coherent theory that ignores the illogic of reality is what Ralph Waldo Emerson was referring to when he spoke of “a foolish consistency” that is a “hobgoblin”, that is, an obstacle to understanding the real world. One-track activism is the hobgoblin of the animal rights movement. History is littered with the wreckage of elegant and reasonable-sounding theories that crashed and burned when they collided with reality. One-track activism—the notion that we must all pursue abolitionist advocacy exclusively—is just such a theory. One-track activism ignores the fact that converting people to animal rights is not primarily a matter of logic. It is primarily about finding our way around the formidable social and psychological barriers that we have erected to defend animal slavery and slaughter. This is why pursuing multiple approaches is essential. We need indirect—logically inconsistent, if you will—tactics to get past the emotional, cultural, familial, and social stone walls that keep people from hearing and acting on the abolitionist message. It is true that we need philosophers and activists like Gary Francione and Alex Hershaft, founder and president of the Farm Animal Rights Movement (FARM) conducting exclusively abolitionist advocacy. They define the goal and assure that we keep it clearly in view. They make sure that we do not become so wrapped up in our pragmatism that we lose sight of the target. And they reach the people who are open to the vegan message. But we also need groups like PETA, The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) and Farm Sanctuary who are simultaneously reaching out to people who react negatively to pure vegan advocacy. Sadly, those people are the vast majority of the population. But unless we can bring them on board, abolition will never become a reality. Moving Forward Step by Step by Step Bismarck was right when he said that politics is the art of the possible. In the real world, as opposed to the ivory tower inhabited by the theorists of one-track activism, you campaign for what it is realistic to think you might be able to get. And when you get it, you use that as a platform to get more. And you keep advancing in that fashion, one step at a time, until you reach your goal. That is how progress takes place. FARM, which is one of the most active groups in the US opposing animal agriculture, refused to support a California ballot initiative in the 2008 election (1) —known as Proposition 2—to ban battery cages and gestation crates because it was a “welfarist” measure. Despite opposition from FARM, Gary Francione, and other one-track advocacy groups, Proposition 2 passed by a wide margin. Today, FARM is conducting a campaign openly using the victory of Prop 2 as a basis for vegan advocacy. I think that is a good use of Prop 2, and it indicates one of the numerous ways in which campaigns for reform can advance abolition. Reform campaigns do not undermine vegan advocacy; they complement and facilitate it. They create a platform from which the next stage of the campaign for an end to animal slavery and slaughter can be launched. The Limits of Flexibility There is, however, one caveat that I want to place on this: we must never claim that eliminating the egregious practices of factory farming will render animal agriculture morally acceptable. I do not approve of programs like the “certified humane” labeling program sponsored by Humane Farm Animal Care and endorsed by a number of other organizations including The Humane Society of the United States. The initiatives they support and the standards they establish reduce the suffering of farmed animals, and in and of themselves, they are a good thing. I would have no trouble supporting them. My problem is with the label. Calling any commercial animal farm “humane” crosses a line. The label endorses the morality of animal agriculture, including animal slaughter; it says that eating this meat or these eggs is OK. When you say that cage free is “more humane” than battery cages, that is a true statement, and it does not send a wrong message. On the contrary, it encourages people to move in the right direction without implying that this is as far as anyone need go. But to say that cage free is “humane” does send a wrong message, and we should not do it. Turning our Backs on Suffering There is a second reason why I am opposed to one-track activism. Suffering matters—it matters a great deal—and I think it is ethically grotesque that animal activists, the only voices that animals have to speak in their defense, should try to shame or browbeat other activists into silence in the face of unspeakable animal suffering. The ultimate crime against animals is their murder, whether that murder is preceded by torture or what Scottish philosopher David Hume called “gentle usage”. But this does not mean that torture is of no consequence and should not be opposed on its own merits. When we are powerless to prevent the murder of farmed animals—as we are today and will be for decades to come—to abandon them to torture is a betrayal of the victims whose spokespeople we are supposed to be. You can’t walk a mile in the shoes of a battery chicken, because battery chickens can’t walk a foot, much less a mile. But stand for an hour in the cage of a battery chicken, Stand jammed so tightly in a cage with other birds that you cannot turn around or stretch your wings. Stand up to your knees in your own excrement and the excrement of your fellow prisoners while being constantly splattered with the feces and urine of prisoners in cages stacked above you. Breathe air so poisonous with ammonia from the urine that your jailers and torturers have to wear protective masks when they enter the building. Never see sunshine. Never breathe fresh air. If you are injured or fall ill, just suffer; nobody cares, nobody is going to send for a doctor. If you die, so what? It’s cheaper that way. This is the existence of a battery hen from shortly after she is born until the moment she is slaughtered. She never sees sunlight, she never breathes clean air, she never takes dust baths or pecks in the dirt, she never sleeps on a perch or sits on a nest, all activities that are vital to the mental as well as the physical health of chickens. This is her life, joyless, hopeless, saturated with suffering 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for the two years that she is allowed to live, a bleak, abysmal, agonizing existence without friendship, comfort, or consolation. And in the face of this misery, the worst atrocity ever perpetrated by the human race, the “abolitionists” tell us that it is wrong to try to ease the agony of these battery hens. They tell us that it is wrong to campaign to abolish these battery cages. Is it any wonder that sometimes I find myself asking, “Whose side are they on, anyway?” Put yourself in the place of a battery hen. If your advocates are unable to prevent your murder, which would you rather they do, sit on their hands and refuse to ease your suffering, explaining that they have an elegant theory—supported by no actual evidence—that they think will lead to the abolition of all animal agriculture at some unknown time decades after you are dead? Or would you rather that they campaign to make your suffering, and the suffering of your children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren for generations to come easier until that happy day arrives when activists have amassed the power to end your murder as well as your torture? If they can ease your torture now, wouldn’t you want them to do that? I know I would. If I were spending my entire life in a battery cage from which I could never be freed, I would be frantic for someone to at least ease my suffering. In her book "Speciesism", Joan Dunayer uses an example so divorced from reality that it boggles the mind. “If I were in a Nazi concentration camp,” Dunayer tells us, “And someone on the outside asked me ‘Do you want me to work for better living conditions, more-humane deaths in the gas chambers, or the liberation of all concentration camps?’ I’d answer, ‘Liberation.’ In fact, I’d find the question bizarre and offensive. I’d regard the focus on better living conditions and more-‘humane’ deaths as immoral.” (62) The unspoken premise underlying Dunayer’s rhetorical question is that a campaign to abolish the camps would have the same likelihood of success as a campaign to ease the inmates’ suffering. In that circumstance, of course we should campaign for abolition. But that is not the situation we are facing in regard to factory farming. At this point in the development of the animal rights movement, campaigns to abolish animal agriculture have no chance of success—and will have none for the foreseeable future—while campaigns to ease the suffering of farmed animals are succeeding on a significant scale here and now. In 1992, Switzerland became the first country in the world to ban battery cages. Since then, several other European nations have followed suit. By 2012, which is rapidly drawing nearer, battery cages will be banned throughout the European Union. These laws have already put an end to the worst suffering of hundreds of millions of birds and will ease the lives of billions more over the coming years. In the United States, where progress lags behind that of the EU, HSUS’ cage free egg campaign has in little more than three years taken tens of millions of laying hens out of battery cages. In this circumstance, the only sensible course of action is to reject Joan Dunayer’s false dilemma and pursue both courses of action simultaneously: that is to say, campaign for abolition and reform at the same time. Or, if you feel that you can be more effective campaigning solely for abolition, do so. We all have limited time, energy, and resources, and we have to devote them where we feel we can do the most good. But do not try to discourage or shame activists who are campaigning for reform. And when you have an opportunity to do things as simple as signing a petition and voting for a measure that would ease the suffering of animals even a bit, sign the petition and cast your ballot. Do not stand back in self-righteous silence while they suffer in the silence of a despair that they are powerless to break. Alex Hershaft once said that “we mustn’t get hung up on suffering.” Dr. Hershaft, like Gary Francione and other one-track activists, believes that focusing on suffering undermines abolition. Alex Hershaft is one of the great pioneers and heroes of this movement. Although we have our differences over strategy, there is no one in the animal rights movement whom I admire more. But that does not change the fact that suffering matters. To those who are enduring it, suffering matters dreadfully. I am hung up on suffering, and I do not apologize for that. The Measures of Progress Reform campaigns are succeeding on three fronts. First, they are reducing the suffering of tens of millions of animals right now and are demonstrating the ability to reduce the suffering of billions of animals over the next few years, and that alone makes them worthwhile. Second, they are driving up the cost of animal agriculture to the point that the industry views them as a threat. The trade journals of the American animal agriculture industry regularly warn against campaigns like those to ban battery cages and gestation crates, and tell their subscribers that organizations like HSUS and Farm Sanctuary are the gravest threat that their industry has ever faced. They generally don’t even bother to mention Gary Francione or the “abolitionist” wing of the movement. Third, reform campaigns are putting animal suffering and death on the public’s radar screen in ways that generate much less resistance than the pure vegan message often does; they are causing people to think of animals as morally important. And that is the change that has to occur before the general public will respond to the vegan message. Peter Singer recently gave an interview to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof (2) in which he said, “There’s some growth in numbers of vegetarians, but the bigger thing is a broad acceptance of the idea that animals count.” Singer has it exactly right. The idea that animals count is the essential foundation on which the eventual success of animal rights will be built. And that idea is being spread by reform campaigns. Kristof’s column is an illustration of this. It was inspired by California’s Proposition 2. Without Prop 2, it would never have been written, and New York Times readers, who tend to be disproportionately drawn from America’s opinion leaders, would never have seen a column that was remarkably sympathetic to animal rights. Our ideology should define our goals. But if we ever want to reach those goals, we must let pragmatism define our strategy. Suffering and dying animals need a strategy that will work in the real world and that will provide them as much relief as possible in the here and now, not one that is ideologically pure and makes its adherents feel good about themselves. And the strategy that offers the most promise on both of these fronts is vegan advocacy supplemented by reform campaigns aimed at producers and reduction campaigns aimed at consumers. A vegan for twenty-five years, Norm Phelps is an American animal rights activist who lives outside of Washington, D. C. with his wife, Patti Rogers, and their family of rescued cats. He is the author of The Dominion of Love: Animal Rights According to the Bible (Lantern, 2002), The Great Compassion: Buddhism and Animal Rights (Lantern, 2004), and The Longest Struggle: Animal Advocacy from Pythagoras to PETA (Lantern, 2007). He may be reached at n.phelps@myactv.net =============================== (1) In the United States, a ballot initiative is a form of direct democracy that exists in some, but not all, states. (It does not exist at the national level.) By gathering a specified number of signatures on a petition, advocates may place a proposed law on the ballot in the next upcoming election, bypassing the state legislature. If a majority of voters approve the proposal, it becomes law in that state. (2) Kristof, Nicholas, “Humanity even for nonhumans,” The New York Times, April 9, 2009. On the worldwide web at www.nytimes.com/2009/04/09/opinion/09kristof.html

A new food guide for North American vegetarians PDF Version http://old.eatright.org/cps/rde/xchg/ada/hs.xsl/governance_5105_ENU_HTML.htm

Flesh of Your Flesh Should you eat meat? by Elizabeth Kolbert November 9, 2009 This year, Americans will consume some thirty-five million cows, a hundred and fifteen million pigs, and nine billion birds. “Eating Animals” (Little, Brown; $25.99);Jonathan Safran Foer;Vegetarians;Meat;“The Face on Your Plate: The Truth About Food” (Norton; $24.95);Jeffrey Moustaieff Masson;Michael Pollan Americans love animals. Forty-six million families in the United States own at least one dog, and thirty-eight million keep cats. Thirteen million maintain freshwater aquariums in which swim a total of more than a hundred and seventy million fish. Collectively, these creatures cost Americans some forty billion dollars annually. (Seventeen billion goes to food and another twelve billion to veterinary bills.) Despite the recession, pet-related expenditures this year are expected to increase five per cent over 2008, in part owing to outlays on luxury items like avian manicures and canine bath spritz. “We have so many customers who say they’d eat macaroni and cheese before they’d cut back on their dogs,” a Colorado pet-store owner recently told the Denver Post. In a survey released this past August, more than half of all dog, cat, and bird owners reported having bought presents for their animals during the previous twelve months, often for no special occasion, just out of love. (Fish enthusiasts may bring home fewer gifts, but they spend more on each one, with the average fish gift coming to thirty-seven dollars.) A majority of owners report that one of the reasons they enjoy keeping pets is that they consider them part of the family. Americans also love to eat animals. This year, they will cook roughly twenty-seven billion pounds of beef, sliced from some thirty-five million cows. Additionally, they will consume roughly twenty-three billion pounds of pork, or the bodies of more than a hundred and fifteen million pigs, and thirty-eight billion pounds of poultry, some nine billion birds. Most of these creatures have been raised under conditions that are, as Americans know—or, at least, by this point have no excuse not to know—barbaric. Broiler chickens, also known, depending on size, as fryers or roasters, typically spend their lives in windowless sheds, packed in with upward of thirty thousand other birds and generations of accumulated waste. The ammonia fumes thrown off by their rotting excrement lead to breast blisters, leg sores, and respiratory disease. Bred to produce the maximum amount of meat in the minimum amount of time, fryers often become so top-heavy that they can’t support their own weight. At slaughtering time, they are shackled by their feet, hung from a conveyor belt, and dipped into an electrified bath known as “the stunner.” For pigs, conditions are little better. Shortly after birth, piglets have their tails chopped off; this discourages the bored and frustrated animals from gnawing one another’s rumps. Male piglets also have their testicles removed, a procedure performed without anesthetic. Before being butchered, hogs are typically incapacitated with a tonglike instrument designed to induce cardiac arrest. Sometimes their muscles contract so violently that they end up not just dead but with a broken back. How is it that Americans, so solicitous of the animals they keep as pets, are so indifferent toward the ones they cook for dinner? The answer cannot lie in the beasts themselves. Pigs, after all, are quite companionable, and dogs are said to be delicious. This inconsistency is the subject of Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Eating Animals” (Little, Brown; $25.99). Unlike Foer’s two previous books, “Everything Is Illuminated” and “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” his latest is nonfiction. The task it sets itself is less to make sense of our behavior than to show how, when our stomachs are involved, it is often senseless. “Food choices are determined by many factors, but reason (even consciousness) is not generally high on the list,” Foer writes. Foer was just nine years old when the problem of being an “eating animal” first presented itself. One evening, his parents left him and his older brother with a babysitter and a platter of chicken. The babysitter declined to join the boys for dinner. “You know that chicken is chicken, right?” she pointed out. Foer’s older brother sniggered. Where had their parents found this moron? But Foer was shaken. That chicken was a chicken! Why had he never thought of this before? He put down his fork. Within a few years, however, he went back to eating chickens and other animals. During high school and college, he converted to vegetarianism several more times, partly to salve his conscience and partly, as he puts it, “to get closer to the breasts” of female activists. Later, he became engaged to a woman (the novelist Nicole Krauss) with a similar history of relapse. They resolved to do better, and immediately violated that resolve by serving meat at their wedding and eating it on their honeymoon. Finally, when he was about to become a father, Foer felt compelled to think about the issue more deeply, and, at the same time, to write about it. “We decided to have a child, and that was a different story that would necessitate a different story,” he says. Foer ends up telling several stories, though all have the same horrific ending. One is about shit. Animals, he explains, produce a lot of it. Crowded into “concentrated animal feeding operations,” or CAFOs, they can produce entire cities’ worth. (The pigs processed by a single company, Smithfield Foods, generate as much excrement as all of the human residents of the states of California and Texas combined.) Unlike cities, though, CAFOs have no waste-treatment systems. The shit simply gets dumped in holding ponds. Imagine, Foer writes, if “every man, woman, and child in every city and town in all of California and all of Texas crapped and pissed in a huge open-air pit for a day. Now imagine that they don’t do this for just a day, but all year round, in perpetuity.” Not surprisingly, the shit in the ponds tends to migrate to nearby streams and rivers, causing algae blooms that kill fish and leave behind aquatic “dead zones.” According to the Environmental Protection Agency, some thirty-five thousand miles of American waterways have been contaminated by animal excrement. Another of Foer’s stories is about microbes. In the U.S., Foer reports, people are prescribed about three million pounds of antibiotics a year. Livestock are fed nearly twenty-eight million pounds, according to the drug industry. By pumping cows and chickens full of antibiotics, farmers have been instrumental in producing new, resistant strains of germs—so-called superbugs. As soon as the Food and Drug Administration approved the use of a class of drugs known as fluoroquinolones in chickens, for instance, the percentage of bacteria resistant to fluoroquinolones shot up. Officials at many health organizations, including the Centers for Disease Control, have called for an end to the indiscriminate use of antibiotics on farms, but, of course, the practice continues. A third story is about suffering. Intuitively, we all know that animals feel pain. (This, presumably, is why we spend so much money on vet bills.) “No reader of this book would tolerate someone swinging a pickax at a dog’s face,” Foer observes. And yet, he notes, we routinely eat fish that have been killed in this way, as well as chickens who have been dragged through the stunner and pigs who have been electrocuted and cows who have had bolts shot into their heads. (In many cases, the cows are not quite killed by the bolts, and so remain conscious as they are skinned and dismembered.) Foer relates how, one night, he sneaked onto a California turkey farm with an animal-rights activist he calls C. Most of the buildings were locked, but the two managed to slip into a shed that housed tens of thousands of turkey chicks. At first, the conditions seemed not so bad. Some of the chicks were sleeping. Others were struggling to get closer to the heat lamps that substitute for their mothers. Then Foer started noticing how many of the chicks were dead. They were covered with sores, or matted with blood, or withered like dry leaves. C spotted one chick splayed out on the floor, trembling. Its eyes were crusted over and its head was shaking back and forth. C slit its throat. “If you stop and think about it, it’s crazy,” she later told Foer. “How would you judge an artist who mutilated animals in a gallery because it was visually arresting? How riveting would the sound of a tortured animal need to be to make you want to hear it that badly? Try to imagine any end other than taste for which it would be justifiable to do what we do to farmed animals.” One day while in Berlin, Franz Kafka went to visit the city’s famous aquarium. According to his friend and biographer Max Brod, Kafka, gazing into the illuminated tanks, addressed the fish directly. “Now at last I can look at you in peace,” he told them. “I don’t eat you anymore.” Kafka, who became what Brod calls a strenger Vegetarianer—a strict vegetarian—is one of the heroes of “Eating Animals.” So is the philosopher Jacques Derrida, and a vegan theology professor named Aaron Gross, who is working on plans for a model slaughterhouse. “This is not paradoxical or ironic,” Gross says of his slaughterhouse work. Foer’s villains include Smithfield, Tyson Foods, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and—rather more surprisingly—Michael Pollan. There is perhaps no more influential critic of the factory farm than Pollan, and Foer acknowledges that he “has written as thoughtfully about food as anyone.” But when Pollan looks at animals he doesn’t feel worried or guilty or embarrassed. He feels, well, hungry. “I have to say there is a part of me that envies the moral clarity of the vegetarian, the blamelessness of the tofu eater,” Pollan observes toward the end of his book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” shortly after describing the thrill of shooting a pig. “Yet part of me pities him, too. Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris.” According to Pollan, it is naïve to see domesticated animals as victims. Some ten thousand years ago, “a handful of especially opportunistic species discovered . . . that they were more likely to survive and prosper in an alliance with humans than on their own,” he writes. The results speak for themselves. Domesticated chickens have never been more numerous, even as the Red Burmese jungle fowl from which they descended is disappearing. Meanwhile, if animals have had to make adjustments to live with people, the reverse is also the case. Humans developed the ability to digest lactose into adulthood, for example, only as a consequence of keeping cows. Given this history, Pollan says, it’s too late for people to start worrying about eating animals. The problem with factory-farmed meat isn’t the meat; it’s the factory. The solution is to return animals to the sorts of places where they can graze and root and fly—or at least flap around—before being dispatched. “I don’t eat industrial meat anymore,” Pollan recently told Newsweek. “I eat grass-fed beef, organic chicken from a place I know.” Foer finds Pollan’s account of inter-species alliances unpersuasive. “Chickens can do many things,” he notes, but they cannot make “sophisticated deals with humans.” And, in any case, if they could, shouldn’t the same terms apply to pets? Once we’re done showering Kitty and Fido with trinkets, let’s bleed them out and fry them up: “If we let dogs be dogs, and breed without interference, we would create a sustainable, local meat supply with low energy inputs that would put even the most efficient grass-based farming to shame,” Foer writes. Meanwhile, the notion that factory-farmed meat can be replaced with boutique-bred beef depends on its own denial of reality: “There isn’t enough nonfactory chicken produced in America to feed the population of Staten Island and not enough nonfactory pork to serve New York City, let alone the country.” Foer seems particularly incensed by the suggestion that deciding not to eat meat represents a delusion of innocence or, worse still, sentimentality. “Two friends are ordering lunch,” he writes: One says, “I’m in the mood for a burger,” and orders it. The other says, “I’m in the mood for a burger,” but remembers that there are things more important to him than what he is in the mood for at any given moment, and orders something else. Who is the sentimentalist? Of the nearly two billion chickens currently being raised in the United States, a dozen live in my back yard.* They were shipped six months ago as chicks, and arrived at the local post office in a cardboard box. Now full-grown, they spend their days laying eggs, pecking around in the grass, and shitting on the walkways. The chickens are happy, or so I dream, as I sit at the window when evening falls. Much of the credit (or blame) for the back-yard-chicken fad belongs to the “local food” movement, which Pollan helped launch. When I ordered my chickens, from a hatchery in Missouri, it was with the idea that my children could learn what it’s like to raise what you eat. I also hoped, in a more Foerian vein, that the experience might prompt a reëvaluation of their relationship with chicken fingers. Recently, I asked whether they would consider becoming vegetarians. One of my sons proposed that, instead of dropping meat, we eat it exclusively. We could, he suggested, call ourselves “mea-gans.” By this point, my kids certainly know that “chicken is chicken,” and also that beef is cows and pork is pigs. About a mile away, there’s a farm with its own little store. Every so often, some piglets arrive at the farm. My sons like to go watch the piglets roll around in the mud. Then they like to go to the store and purchase the sausages that have been made from the piglets’ predecessors. In this way, the boys are a lot like the chickens. Though the hens have plenty of feed in their coop, they prefer to scratch in the dirt for living things. They are especially fond of centipedes and grubs. More than once, I’ve seen them pick up a red-spotted newt by its neck, shake it dead, then toss it aside. (The newts are poisonous, something the chickens apparently discover too late.) A few weeks ago, they cornered a small rabbit under a neighbor’s car. Whether or not they were hoping to kill it, the creature was clearly terrified. Very broadly speaking, there are two arguments to be made on behalf of eating animals. One is that people are animals. Different animals naturally have different diets; in our case, this diet includes meat. Our ancestors certainly liked a nice bone to gnaw on. Indeed, one theory of human development posits that a diet high in animal protein was what allowed human beings to become human in the first place. (As hominids’ brains grew, the theory goes, they became better hunters; this allowed their guts to shrink, which facilitated further brain growth.) Studies of hunter-gatherer societies show that anywhere from twenty-six per cent (in the case of the Gwi, of southern Africa) to ninety-nine per cent (the Nunamiut, of Alaska) of their caloric intake comes from eating meat. The second argument is that animals are not people. People may have obligations toward animals—to enforce these, there are laws against animal cruelty—but these obligations do not preclude ingesting them. Pollan contends that “people who care about animals should be working to ensure that the ones they eat don’t suffer, and that their deaths are swift and painless.” Similarly, the author and livestock expert Temple Grandin, who designs what are often called “humane slaughterhouses,” argues, “We owe animals a decent life and a painless death.” We “forget that nature can be harsh,” she has written. “Death at the slaughter plant is quicker and less painful than death in the wild. Lions dining on the guts of a live animal is much worse in my opinion.” Foer’s position is that all such arguments are, finally, bogus. We eat meat because we like to, and we devise justifications afterward. “Almost always, when I told someone I was writing a book about ‘eating animals,’ they assumed, even without knowing anything about my views, that it was a case for vegetarianism,” he says. “It’s a telling assumption, one that implies not only that a thorough inquiry into animal agriculture would lead one away from eating meat, but that most people already know that to be the case.” What we know about eating animals is that we don’t want to know. Although he never explicitly equates “concentrated animal feeding operations” with the Final Solution, the German model of at once seeing and not seeing clearly informs Foer’s thinking. The book is framed by tales of his grandmother, a Holocaust survivor whose culinary repertoire consists of a single dish: roast chicken with carrots. Foer’s novels are pointedly postmodern; they play with voice and genre, language and typography. (“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” ends with a flip book of a body either falling out of or flying away from the World Trade Center.) “Eating Animals” is written in a similar po-mode; it is constantly shifting among formats—a glossary of terms, interviews, personal vignettes—and each chapter is introduced with a page or two of graphic art. The chapter titled “Hiding/Seeking,” for example, opens with an outline of a box, sixty-seven squares in area, which is supposed to illustrate the amount of space allotted to a typical laying hen. Some may object that Foer’s style is too playful (or gimmicky) for what he contends is a deadly serious subject. Others will argue that he lacks the courage of his convictions. For much of “Eating Animals,” it appears that Foer is arguing for vegetarianism as the only moral course. Then, it turns out, he isn’t—or, at least, not quite. In the middle of the book, Foer becomes friendly with a farmer named Frank Reese, who raises what are known as “heritage” turkeys. (It is for Reese that Aaron Gross, the vegan theology professor, is trying to design a model—and also mobile—slaughterhouse.) Evolutionarily speaking, heritage turkeys fall somewhere between the wild variety that the colonists encountered and the obscenely large-breasted breeds that now fill the meat aisle. A heritage turkey is probably what your great-grandparents served if they celebrated Thanksgiving. “I have placed my wager on a vegetarian diet and I have enough respect for people like Frank, who have bet on a more humane animal agriculture, to support their kind of farming,” Foer writes. “This is not in the end a complicated position.” But it is, or at least it’s complicated to parse. If the problem with nonfactory chicken is that there isn’t enough of it, how can heritage birds represent a solution? (There are barely enough heritage turkeys being raised in America to feed Tottenville, let alone all of Staten Island.) And what does it mean for Foer to “support” Reese’s kind of farming while urging his readers to boycott his product? Meanwhile, it could be argued that even a vegetarian diet falls short. As Foer is well aware, some of the animals that suffer most from the factory-farm system aren’t the ones that end up on the table. Most dairy cows spend their lives in sheds, where they are milked two or three times a day by machine. Many develop chronic udder infections. Laying chickens are kept in cages, jammed in so tightly that they don’t have room to spread their wings. To prevent them from cannibalizing one another, their beaks are trimmed with a hot blade. When their production begins to decline, they are starved for a week or two to reset their biological clocks. Foer never says anything about forgoing eggs or dairy, which seems to imply that he consumes them. In “The Face on Your Plate: The Truth About Food” (Norton; $24.95), Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson offers many of the same observations about factory farming as Foer. To align his food choices with his ethics, Masson writes, he had to take the “final step” and become a vegan. But is even veganism really enough? The cost that consumer society imposes on the planet’s fifteen or so million non-human species goes way beyond either meat or eggs. Bananas, bluejeans, soy lattes, the paper used to print this magazine, the computer screen you may be reading it on—death and destruction are embedded in them all. It is hard to think at all rigorously about our impact on other organisms without being sickened. “Eating Animals” closes with a turkey-less Thanksgiving. As a holiday, it doesn’t sound like a lot of fun. But this is Foer’s point. We are, he suggests, defined not just by what we do; we are defined by what we are willing to do without. Vegetarianism requires the renunciation of real and irreplaceable pleasures. To Foer’s credit, he is not embarrassed to ask this of us. ♦ *Correction, November 4, 2009: The number of chickens currently being raised in the United States is nearly two billion, not four hundred and fifty billion, as originally stated. Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/11/09/091109crbo_books_kolbert#ixzz0apzt6VC3 http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/11/09/091109crbo_books_kolbert

Three workers suspended and CCTV installed in organic abattoir following cruelty allegations Posted 11 December 2009 Three slaughtermen have been suspended from a Soil Association-approved abattoir following an undercover investigation by Animal Aid that reveals what the government regulatory body, the Meat Hygiene Service (MHS), describes as ‘clear evidence of breaches of animal welfare legislation’. The national campaign group’s footage of pigs and sheep being killed was shot secretly between October 19 and November 3 at Tom Lang Ltd, in Ashburton, Devon. The evidence was handed to the MHS. The film shows animals being kicked, slapped and thrown; improperly stunned; and even decapitated while they may still have been alive. In a formal response to Animal Aid, the MHS has said that, as well as the suspension of the three workers, the plant operator has now installed CCTV ‘to record the slaughtering process’. This is in line with Animal Aid’s key campaign objective to see the compulsory introduction of CCTV in all British abattoirs and for the footage obtained to be periodically reviewed by an independent panel. The MHS has also announced that ‘evidence to support a potential prosecution of [T Lang’s] slaughterhouse operator and slaughterers is being collated’. The Soil Association, which insists that it upholds the highest welfare standards, has suspended Lang from its scheme as a result of Animal Aid's evidence. The Lang investigation is published less than four months after the release of 40 hours of Animal Aid footage shot secretly at three mainstream, non-organic abattoirs. That earlier footage showed ewes being stunned while baby lambs still suckled at their teats – as well as pigs and sheep being kicked, shoved and dragged. A slaughterman at one of the abattoirs – AC Hopkins, in Taunton, Somerset – faces prosecution under the animal welfare legislation. Animal Aid declared at the time of publication of footage from those three abattoirs that it ‘convincingly disposes of the myth of stress- and pain-free humane slaughter’, given that the abattoirs in which filming took place were randomly selected. Tom Lang Ltd was also randomly selected for investigation, with a view to discovering how much better animals fare in a typical Soil Association-approved abattoir that produces organic meat. The new footage reveals that animals are at risk of random violence and practices that increase their pain and fear, whatever the system of killing. Says Animal Aid Head of Campaigns, Kate Fowler: ‘The public is encouraged to believe that animals are killed in a humane, competent and considerate manner in mainstream British slaughterhouses. Our detailed secret filming over recent months in four establishments presents an unprecedented record of the horrors that are the everyday norm. We see animals subjected to random violence and incompetent practices that have clearly dismayed and alarmed the official industry regulatory body. That we should see such scenes in a Soil Association-approved abattoir will be especially distressing for those who expected better from such establishments. The evidence we have been accumulating points to a simple truth: the production and killing of animals for meat is an ugly, violent, business – however the final product is labelled. At the very least, CCTV must be installed in all British abattoirs so that some light is shone on the process. That won’t end the suffering but it could reduce it.’ http://www.animalaid.org.uk/h/n/NEWS/pr_factory//2241// VIDÉOS http://www.animalaid.org.uk/h/f/CAMPAIGNS/blog//4//?be_id=231 Still images from Tom Lang slaughterhouse footage Posted 9 December 2009 http://www.animalaid.org.uk/h/n/NEWS/pr_factory//2237//

(Je suis persuadée que c'est pareil au Canada) New focus on illegal slaughterhouses May be Illegal By Curtis Morgan and Juan Carlos Chavez, Miami Herald 10:17 a.m. EST, December 20, 2009 For 20 years, Tony Maqueira has routinely trucked pigs down from upstate to sell in rural Northwest Miami-Dade. With demand for a Nochebuena roast pig at its peak last week, he simply parked his squealing load along West Okeechobee Road and waited for customers from nearby small farms to come to him. Asked if buyers are licensed to kill and sell pigs, Maqueira, an impeccably polite man wearing the straw hat and black rubber boots of a working rancher, appeared momentarily puzzled. Then he shrugged and explained there were worse things to worry about in these unpaved, impoverished outskirts: cockfights, dogfights, guns, drugs. ``This is food,'' he said. ``This is good for the people.'' But the small, often-filthy slaughterhouses that have operated for decades in an unincorporated pocket west of Hialeah also are illegal. Most violate an array of business, code, health and environmental regulations. At least a few are suspected as the source of Miami's black market in horse flesh, a thriving illicit trade exposed by a string of grisly horse killings this year. On Thursday, county code enforcers, state health inspectors and federal food safety investigators hit one of the largest operations in the area, known as the C-9 Basin. Just north of Okeechobee Road and west of the Florida Turnpike, it is zoned for agricultural use and dominated by nurseries, wetlands and an assortment of other ramshackle developments, from trailer parks to small farms, or ranchos. The agencies issued a long list of violations. They found garbage dumped around the property, an illegal restaurant, butcher tables, a fly infestation in the slaughter area and hog pen, and a freezer packed with meat -- no horse, but whole and sectioned hogs ready for sale. In Miami-Dade, a variance is required to raise hogs, and while the landowner had applied last year, he had been denied four times, said Charles Danger, director of the county's building and neighborhood compliance department. ``This is not just raising pigs,'' said Danger, ``this looks like a slaughterhouse.'' The U.S. Department of Agriculture, Danger said, locked down the freezers and the county issued a five-day notice to cut power. ``We're going to put them out of service.'' For Richard Couto, a former board member and investigator with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in South Florida, the action was long overdue and, he hopes, the start of a wider crackdown. For the past year, Couto has pressed county agencies for action, calling the cottage industry an open -- and nasty -- secret behind the horse killings that drew national media attention and have become a black eye for the community. He believes the rampant, unregulated butchering of goats, chickens and pigs for everything from Christmas Eve feasts to Santeria rituals to neighborhood cafe fare is even worse. ``This is going to be a bigger black eye. These illegal slaughter farms have been running for north of 20 to 30 years without anyone doing anything about it,'' said Couto, who left the SPCA to form his own group, Animal Recovery Mission. No slaughter operation, even those overseen by the USDA, is pleasant. But licenses require humane stunning before slaughter and an array of health and handling standards. Couto supplied regulators, as well as The Miami Herald and a CNN reporter, with packages of photos he took at several sites. They showed large pools of blood and waste seeping into open ground; entrails stacked on butcher tables; a fly-covered, decapitated baby goat. Couto stressed that he's a meat eater himself, but he called the conditions in which animals are kept and killed ``nasty, disgusting and filthy.'' Couto said he has witnessed animals being butchered while still in their death throes, ``and that's a real problem for me.'' AGENCY LIMITATIONS Most of the farms are modest and are owned or operated by immigrants from other countries where slaughtering standards can vary widely. In November, the Miami-Dade Commission passed a resolution condemning the horse slaughters and urging a crackdown, but Couto still suspects there is cultural and political resistance from local officials. ``For us, it's not a cultural limitation,'' said Carlos Espinosa, director of the Miami-Dade Department of Environmental Resource Management. ``Our work is focused on wetlands and incidental environmental issues. The mere fact of having pigs on your property is not a violation.'' County police, prosecutors and other county agencies echoed that argument. They contend that murky laws dilute authority and make it hard to make cases stick. In Florida, the USDA oversees licensed slaughter houses, but unlicensed ones fall between the regulatory cracks, with multiple agencies having some small slice of jurisdiction. The USDA does have investigators who will assist local agencies in illegal slaughter investigations, spokesman Caleb Weaver said from Washington. Weaver declined to discuss any current probes. ``All we can say at this time is the USDA is aware of the situation and we are working with state and local authorities,'' he said. Espinosa and Danger acknowledge that the C-9 Basin is a hot spot for a host of problems -- from cockfighting rings to big, unpermitted gravel lots for semi-trailers -- and they have targeted it in the past with periodic sweeps of animal slaughterhouses. Between 2001 and 2005, the county reported closing six operations. Police have made a number of arrests since. DERM and code enforcers have issued dozens of citations for wetlands, trash, sanitary nuisance and building code violations since. ``It's very hard to make people comply through the zoning procedure,'' Danger said, and swamped county judges tend to quickly dismiss minor infractions. Hogs can't be raised without a county variance, for instance, but owners cited in the past have paid fines and reopened. Miami-Dade police have arrested five people in horse killings this year and expect more. But detective Edna Hernandez, a spokeswoman, said investigators aren't pursuing cases in the unlicensed slaughter of other livestock. Only horse meat is illegal to sell commercially. ``We're not participating in these investigations, because we found the most effective way to combat this is with code compliance and animal services,'' she said. Only two slaughterhouses in the county are licensed to raise and slaughter pigs -- Cabrera's in nearby Hialeah Gardens and Madson Meat in Medley. Owner John Madson said he believes agencies simply don't have the resources to pursue what are often mom-and-pop operations. He said he's ``learned to live with it'' after 35 years. ``Obviously, it affects my businesses,'' he said -- particularly around Christmas Eve, when many families traditionally serve roast pig. ``There is a lot of unwarranted and unwanted competition from people who slaughter under a tree as opposed to all the licensing and rules I've got.'' THE HORSE MARKET As of Dec. 1, 21 horse carcasses had been discovered this year in vacant fields, most near the C-9 area, and Couto suspects hundreds more have been burned or disposed of undetected. In November, police arrested a ranch owner and a worker at a C-9 ranch after they sold horse meat to an undercover officer. Danger said there was no evidence the farm hit Thursday slaughtered horses. But Couto, who rescued a sickly thoroughbred from the same property last year, called police in to confiscate two sickly horses he found in a stall and field. Marilyn Coto, whose husband, Manuel, runs the farm that agencies raided Thursday, declined to comment as county and federal inspectors handed her citations, and again in a phone call Friday. Many farm operators in the C-9 openly advertise their offerings. Homemade signs are posted on fences and corners. The one out front of Pedro's Rancho reads ``Se Vende Todo Tipo de Animales.'' We sell all types of animals. When asked about butchering, however, owner Pedro Rodriguez gave an answer commonly repeated to reporters touring the areas: He knew of others who did ``bad things,'' but he only sold his animals live. Copyright 2009, South Florida Sun-Sentinel http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/breakingnews/fl-slaughterhouses-under-watch-20091220,0,3027170,full.story

Russia to send monkey to Mars Moscow, Dec 22, 2009: Russian scientists have revealed that a monkey may be sent to Mars. According to reports, Russia's Cosmonautics Academy is in preliminary talks with the Institute of Experimental Pathology and Therapy in Georgia, which supplied apes for a similar programme in the 1980s. It would also arrange for a simulated space flight to Mars that would lay the foundation for a future mission, as a round-trip journey to Mars is estimated to take about 520 days, so a Mars-bound space ape would have to withstand confinement for very lengthy periods of time. 'Earlier this programme was aimed at sending cosmonauts, people (to Mars). But, given the length of the flight to Mars, and given the cosmic rays for which we don't have adequate protection over such a long trip, discussions have focused recently on sending an ape instead of a person,' The Telegraph quoted Zurab Mikvabia, Director of the Institute of Experimental Pathology and Therapy, as saying. Scientists are also considering sending a robot along on the mission to feed and clean up after the ape. 'The robot will feed the monkey, will clean up after it. Our task will be to teach the monkey to co-operate with the robot,' Mikvabia said. http://www.newkerala.com/news/fullnews-16785.html

http://www.ukrmb.co.uk/images/LippertSapySummary.pdf

Il y a aussi des humains qui ressentent la douleur des animaux... Santé mentale Pouvoir ressentir la douleur d'autrui BUM 23 décembre 2009 Chez certaines personnes, l’empathie et la compassion sont des émotions qui arrivent rapidement devant la souffrance d’une autre personne. On sait depuis longtemps que de voir une personne souffrir provoque une expérience émotive partagée dans le cerveau, mais jusqu’ici, rien ne pouvait prouver qu’il est aussi possible de partager une souffrance physique. Jody Osborn et Stuart Derbyshire, deux chercheurs britanniques de l’École de psychologie de l’Université de Birmingham, se sont penchés sur la question et ont trouvé la preuve scientifique du phénomène. 108 participants ont été inscrits à l’étude. Ils ont visionné des photographies où l’on voyait des athlètes souffrir d’une blessure ou encore des gens recevoir une injection. Les chercheurs ont analysé les réactions des régions du cerveau à l’aide de l’imagerie par résonance magnétique. Le tiers des participants disait avoir ressenti une douleur physique au même endroit que se trouvait la blessure sur la photo. Bien que les chercheurs aient constaté une activité dans le centre émotionnel chez tous les participants, l’activité était plus intense chez ceux ayant eu une douleur physique. Cela confirme donc que certaines personnes ont des réactions physiques et peuvent partager la douleur d’une autre personne. http://sante.canoe.com/channel_health_news_details.asp?news_id=4828&news_channel_id=33&channel_id=33

La listériose serait-elle sur le point de revenir hanter les Québécois? La compagnie Olymel et l’Agence canadienne d’inspection des aliments (ACIA) ont publié ce matin un avis de danger pour la santé. C’est que certains produits de viande transformés, vendus sous les marques Olymel, Royal, Lafleur et Roma, pourraient être contaminés par la bactérie Listeria monocytogenes. Les produits, qui ont été distribués au Québec et en Ontario, ne doivent pas être consommés. ... http://lcn.canoe.ca/lcn/infos/national/archives/2009/12/20091223-113503.html

Agence QMI Sarah-Maude Lefebvre 23/12/2009 14h59 MONTRÉAL - En ces temps d’accommodements raisonnables où l’emploi de l’expression «Temps des Fêtes» remplace le traditionnel «Joyeux Noël», l’organisme Promis a décidé d’aller à contre-courant et d’intégrer les nouveaux arrivants en les plongeant directement dans l’univers du Père Noël. Pour la septième année de suite, les bénévoles de Promis, qui offrent des services d’accompagnement aux nouveaux arrivants, ont amené la semaine dernière une dizaine de familles d’immigrants, dont certains ne sont au Québec que depuis un mois, visiter le père Noël au Complexe Desjardins. ... http://fr.canoe.ca/infos/quebeccanada/archives/2009/12/20091223-145929.html

mercredi 23 décembre 2009 Les phoques nombreux dans l'estuaire ... La population de phoques a explosé au cours des dernières années dans le golfe du Saint-Laurent. Selon le dernier recensement de Pêches et Océans Canada, la population de phoques du Groenland est maintenant évaluée à 6,8 millions de bêtes. http://www.radio-canada.ca/regions/est-quebec/2009/12/21/004-phoques_estuaire_St-Laurent.shtml

Listériose Neuf produits rappelés Mise à jour le mercredi 23 décembre 2009 Deux des produits rappelés mardi par l'Agence canadienne d'inspection des aliments. L'Agence canadienne d'inspection des aliments (ACIA) et les manufacturiers Olymel et Siena Foods demandent à la population de ne pas consommer certains produits de viande transformés. Ces produits pourraient être contaminés par la bactérie Listeria monocytogenes, responsable de la listériose. Ils ont été rappelés par les fabricants. Dans le cas de Siena Foods, le rappel ne concerne que du salami cacciatore doux. Dans le cas d'Olymel cependant, la liste de rappel comprend huit produits commercialisés sous les marques Olymel, Royal, Lafleur et Roma. La liste complète des produits rappelés, incluant leur code CUP, leur format et leur date de péremption, se trouve sur le site de l'ACIA. Jusqu'ici, l'ACIA ne rapporte aucun cas de la maladie associé à la consommation de ces produits. Les produits rappelés ont été distribués en Ontario et au Québec. Le salami de Siena Foods pourrait avoir été distribué ailleurs pays.

Ottawa to counter online sealing opposition Foreign Affairs to correct what it says is misinformation about seal hunt Last Updated: Thursday, December 24, 2009 CBC News The federal government plans to step up its efforts to fight opposition to the Canadian seal hunt by countering the online campaigns created by anti-sealing groups. The Department of Foreign Affairs has posted a request for proposals on the contract tendering site MERX. The public tender listing describes the contract as "social media reputation and online issues management of the seal hunt." It says anti-sealing groups are using digital communications and technologies to "great advantage," which the federal government wants to counter. "Organized opposition to the seal hunt has been increasing internationally since the government of Canada announced a five-year management plan in 2006," the listing says. "Tactics also include posting videos, images and other details Š on platforms like YouTube and Flickr where sharing and viewership are maximized." Foreign Affairs says the information is "frequently incorrect or disingenuous." Simone MacAndrew, a spokeswoman for Foreign Affairs, said in an email to CBC News that "Canada goes to great lengths to ensure a humane, well-regulated and sustainable seal hunt." MacAndrew said the contract would be a pilot project to help deliver that message and to counter the negative publicity surfacing on some online sites. Some of objectives listed for the project include a plan to: * Monitor, measure and counter the inaccurate claims online of anti-sealing groups. * Provide balanced viewpoints and correct misinformation. * Establish foundations and recommendations for future programs and campaigns to identify, activate and engage a supportive community of digital influencers online through education and dialogue. * Complement government of Canada communications activities, domestically and internationally, online. "The project goal is to allow the government to provide additional information, including correcting false information and dispelling myths about the Canadian seal hunt," MacAndrew said in her email. The Department of Foreign Affairs estimates the value of the work is between $50,000 and $100,000. http://www.cbc.ca/canada/newfoundland-labrador/story/2009/12/24/nl-seal-hunt -241209.html

Federal government posts job ad for someone to monitor seal hunt chatter on Internet By Jennifer Ditchburn (CP) – 4 days ago OTTAWA — Canada's Olympic mascots are meant to be cute and cuddly, but visit one anti-sealing website and you'll see Quatchi angrily wielding a club and blood dripping from Miga's snarling jaws. The federal government is getting antsy about the beating it's taking on sites such as www.Olympicshame2010.com, run by animal-rights group PETA, so its looking for its own social media guru to protect its reputation. Last week, the Department of Foreign Affairs posted a $75,000 contract for a "Social Media Reputation and Online Issues Management" adviser on the seal hunt. The winning applicant would analyze what's out there on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and other sites, as well as examine what techniques anti-seal hunt groups use to maximize their profile on search engines. On Facebook alone, a search of the terms "seal hunt" comes up with more than 500 hits, some of them groups with thousands of members with titles such as "Stop the Canadian Seal Hunt." Pictures or links to YouTube feature footage of seals being clubbed or their bloody corpses in the snow. The department would like to "gauge the nature of discussions, the positive to negative percentage of dialogue and be positioned, if possible, to correct misinformation," says the contract description. The request for bids specifically mentions how "anti-sealing groups plan to leverage the visibility of the 2010 Winter Games." "We already have in place rigorous animal welfare standards - legislation, regulations and licence conditions - to ensure that the seal hunt is humane," said Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Simone MacAndrew. "The project goal is to allow the government to provide additional information including: correcting false information and dispelling myths about the Canadian the seal hunt." Sheryl Fink, a senior researcher with the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), said she's not convinced the federal government will have much luck if it tries to insert itself into the digital dialogue on the seal hunt. "Facebook and Twitter, those things really are grassroots, and generally when a government or corporation tries to play that game they haven't been very successful because people see it for what it is, which is communications propaganda," said Fink. But Andres Restrepo of Montreal's Ressac Media says organizations concerned about their reputations ignore the "game changing" social media phenomenon at their peril. They must monitor what's out there, figure out whether it's having a significant impact, and then respond quickly at the source before letting a negative discussion snowball into a public relations disaster, he said. "There is a lot of content online that is commented on, reviewed and shared, so average people become editors of what's going to become important on the media scene," said Restrepo. "With the seal hunt, the whole conversation, the point of view that is most exposed, is of those who are against the seal hunt ... so the goal of the government with that contract is to win more of the market share of the conversation so we have another point of view." Copyright 2009 The Canadian Press. All rights reserved. http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5jSek5ssvABMv_zBEvFTIaqEZIiNw

http://www.olympicshame2010.com/ Campagne de PETA pour les Olympiques 2010

http://aequoanimo.com/nosactions2009.html

Merci hop ! On peut le lire si on fait un zoom sur le texte... Tu ne pourrais pas mieux dire

http://aequoanimo.com/nosactions2009.html

hihihihi c'est bien le même bonhomme à la longue, s'il continue à réfléchir, il finira peut-être par faire le lien...

La souffrance de ces travailleurs est à mon avis beaucoup moindre que celle des animaux. Et si ces travailleurs sont stressés, qu'ils souffrent, pourquoi alors ne suivent-ils pas un cours de formation pour apprendre un autre métier? Comme ça n'est pas demain la veille qu'il n'existera plus d'élevages de cochons, en attendant, si l'immuno castration évite des souffrances atroces aux porcelets, pourquoi la protection animale serait-elle contre? Étrange quand-même qu'à aucun moment, elle ne parle de végétalisme comme solution de rechange à tous ces problèmes...! Vie commune... (?) On ne peut pas comparer la vie commune qui existe, entre par exemple un chien domestique aimé par son maître et celle qui devrait selon elle exister entre l'homme et un animal élevé pour sa viande, un autre pour sa fourrure, pour le travail, pour des expériences de recherches... Je ne comprends pas ce qu'elle tente d'expliquer... Il n'y a pas que des vies communes heureuses