Time magazine, surely not a vegetarian-style magazine, has included abstinence from meat as one of the ways it suggests to help curb global warming. It uses the famous UN report on the impact that livestock has on the environment as the basis of its report. And it is correct except that it gives the impression that only cattle is the problem, leaving readers room to assume that pigs, chickens, fish and every other animal are okay to consume. It’s not, neither from an environmental point of view, nor from the ethical stand point, which is what veganism is about.
Avoiding meat is not merely an environmental action; it is something that stems from our hearts because we all know, or at least intuitively feel, that there’s something awfully wrong with breeding animals into this world to exterminate them after a life of suffering. At this point, I’ll pass the word to Dave Warwak, a teacher who was fired for teaching his students about the way animals are killed and generally treated.
Something terrible in happening in Egypt right now. The government of the Northern African country decided to slaughter its swine population because of swine flu and is doing so in the most brutal way. Says Compassion in World Farming, an animal welfare UK organization:
Hundreds of pigs are dragged from their smallholder pens and dumped live and fully conscious into a huge dumper truck. Fighting to breathe, the animals writhe on top of each other. From a distance, the scene almost looks like a tin of maggots. Come closer, and the true horror is clear. The animals are then driven to mass graves where they are covered in caustic chemicals before being buried. Media reports tell of the pigs screaming at the pain of the chemicals for half hour or more before they are dead. This is the intended fate of all of Egypt’s 400,000 pigs.”
The organization has also released disturbing footage of the way the animals are being rounded and taken to mass graves. This must be stopped immediately.
Please add your voice to the organization’s protest as there is no place in the world for such unspeakable brutality.
I wish I could be there … but if you are in the area, make sure you join the throngs of vegetable-customed vegans (well, not quite everyone) marching down the Greenwich Village next Sunday, 17 May. It’s the Veggie Pride Parade and the line up starts at 11 to launch at 12noon.
This the second issue of the event that started last year, inspired by a similar initiative in Europe. It will be a day of fun, talks from luminaries from the animal rights movement, music and plant foods galore. Un-missable!
Watch the video of the 2008 Veggie Pride Parade in New York City
Great news! Today the European Parliament made history when it voted overwhelmingly to ban trade in seal products. This vote means that all three European Union (EU) institutions - the Commission, the Council, and the Parliament — are now in agreement, and seal products will no longer be placed on the market within the EU.
Europe has been a primary market for Canadian seal products, and many believe this ban spells the beginning of the end of the slaughter. This particular issue has become a cause-cèlebre for animal rights, perhaps because of the harrowing imagery that it creates as well as the sheer banality of this cruel trade. Canada’s defiance has left the world in shock for many decades.
“Closing markets saves seals’ lives. Just the prospect of an EU ban on seal product trade was enough to drive the prices for seal fur down to just $15 Canadian per skin this year — a decline of 86 percent since 2006. Many sealers chose not to hunt seals this year as a result — and to date, out of a quota of 338,200 seals, just 57,622 have been killed. It is likely that when the seal hunt officially ends on 15 May, a quarter of a million seals will have been spared a horrible death. Now that the EU has banned its trade in seal products, countless more seals will live out their lives in peace from this year forward”, said the Humane Society, one of the main organizations working towards the ban, in an official statement.
“But even as we celebrate this amazing victory, we must remain vigilant. Because there is every chance the sealing industry will develop new markets”, the organization warned. “We will continue maintaining economic pressure on Canada’s fishing industry through our boycott of Canadian seafood products. We will continue pressing for a strong law in Canada to stop commercial sealing. And we will continue to lobby other nations to ban seal products.”
Please join us as we finally put an end to the cruel slaughter of baby seals. Become a monthly supporter of Humane Society International and help us keep the pressure on Canada. We are thrilled by our success in passing this ban today, but there is still more to be done.
We are so close to putting this cruelty in the history books where it belongs — thank you for being a part of this historic campaign to save the seals. I know we can count on you to stay with us as we bring a final end to Canada’s commercial seal slaughter.
Animal experimentation saves lives … or so would the pro-vivisection lobby like us to believe. You know, scientists everywhere are working hard to advance science and save humanity from the inevitable end called death by killing hundreds of millions of animals and carrying out experiments such as … dropping liquefied freebase cocaine on bee’s backs. Because, as we all know, bees love cocaine – have you never seen them buzzing out of a cubicle inside a nightclub, lock-jawed, antsy and gurning like hell? And guess what the Australian scientists found with this addictively interesting research?
“Bees react much like humans do: cocaine alters their judgment, stimulates their behaviour and makes them exaggeratedly enthusiastic about things that might not otherwise excite them.”
Wow, that sounds like the stuff that only people on coke are interested in, actually. To celebrate such life-saving discovery, filmmaker Noah Baumbach penned for the New Yorker a wordy outburst that evokes what it must be like inside a coked-up bee’s mind. Un-bee-lievable! I guess a ludicrous, nonsensical piece of writing is a smart way to react to ludicrous, unethical research, like all animal experiments are.
