Well here we go again; anger as one type of meat is consumed whilst other meats are seemingly acceptable. Hypocritical speciesism aside, any increase of available meat products is a blow to human health, animal life and the environment - just see every post on this blog for the detriment of meat to all these things.

Anger over squirrel meat on sale in north London

The north London store owner says he sells about a dozen grey squirrels each week

A north London grocery store is committing “wildlife massacre” by selling squirrel meat, an animal welfare group has claimed.

Vegetarians International Voice for Animals (Viva) accused a
branch of Budgens of supporting a “barbaric and needless cull” of grey
squirrels.

An independently-owned branch in Crouch End has been selling the meat for four months.

Shop owner Andrew Thornton said he sold the meat for “sustainability reasons”.

Mr Thornton, who buys his squirrels from a supplier in north
Essex, said he sold about a dozen squirrels a week at about £3 or £4
each.

BBC News - Anger over squirrel meat on sale in north London

Is the uproar being caused by import of monkey and atelope meat to New York, a reaction to worry about disease, intolerance to different religious customs, or speciesism? Certainly if the meat being imported was of a variety more typically seen in the West the meatismurder team predict the news coverage wouldn’t have been so massive. Monkeys are like us, and antelopes are so graceful thay deserve column inches. Those damn cows though…they can look after themselves.

NEW YORK (AP) — From her baptism in Liberia to Christmas years later in her adopted New York City, Mamie Manneh never lost the longing to celebrate religious rituals by eating monkey meat.

Family members sit with a portrait of Mamie Manneh at their home in Staten Island, New York.

Now, the tribal customs of Manneh and other West African immigrants have become the focus of an unusual criminal case charging her with meat smuggling, and touching on issues of religious freedom, infectious diseases and wildlife preservation.

The case “appears to be the first of its kind relating to that uniquely African product,” defense attorney Jan Rostal wrote in a pending motion to dismiss. “Unfortunately, it represents the sort of clash of cultural and religious values inherent in the melting pot that is America.”

At the center of the case in federal court is a modest woman with nine children and a history of domestic discord.

The case dates to early 2006, when federal inspectors at JFK Airport examined a shipment of 12 cardboard boxes from Guinea.

They were addressed to Manneh and, according to a flight manifest, contained African dresses and smoked fish with a value of $780.

Instead, stashed underneath the smoked fish, the inspectors found what West Africans refer to as bushmeat: “skulls, limbs and torsos of nonhuman primate species” plus the hoof and leg of a small antelope, according to court papers.

Three days later, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agents were at Manneh’s door, where she told them she ran a smoked fish importing business.

According to the agents, she initially denied ordering any bushmeat from Africa or ever eating it while in the United States.

But after she consented to a search, the agents came across a tiny, hairy arm hidden in her garage.

“Monkey,” she explained, claiming the arm was sent to her out of the blue “as a gift from God in heaven.”

Federal prosecutors hit Manneh with smuggling charges that accused her of violating import procedures and suggested she was a menace to man and beast alike.

A criminal complaint cited evidence that the illegal importation of bushmeat encourages the slaughter of protected wild animals.

The advert below is an advert from a professional ad agency tackling the subject of shark fin soup. It is always great to see fresh eyes approaching Animal Rights topics and the subsequent results. Hopefully presenting the subjects favourably to a new audience. As an Animal Rights Activists there is always a difficulty in campaigning against one type of animal product over another. More chickens are killed every year (800m+ per year just in the UK) than sharks so why spend time and energy campaigning against shark fin soup and not broiler chickens? The truth is that the general public are speciesist and certain subjects press buttons and repulse people. When they are repulsed and they have their concious pricked it opens up an oppurtunity for a campaign that can be won. If burgers on the UK high streets were to suddenly be made of fluffy cats for example, one weekend of leafleting and the burger trade would collapse. It’s also a matter of convenience and custom. It’s easy for the average person to stop eating shark fin soup without a moments further thought, but if you take way their chicken and chips what are they going to eat? As a vegan I know that the answer is that if you take away meat and the laziness that this diet engenders, a 100 new foods appear everyday. It’s also true that exotic foods bring out simmering xenophobia. People get enraged that the French eat horses whilst blithely ignoring their own cow intake. People are also not prepared to see the animals they eat as individuals. Their dogs yes. Their freinds’ cats, sure. But not the pigs that go into a bacon sandwich. But strangely you can make them care about a species. If a species is near extinction people care. Then the individuals seem to matter as part of a bigger picture. But I would argue that animal suffering and early slaughter is the same whether that animal is loved as a companion animal, is a member of an endangered species, or is considered livestock. Wildaid who are behind the campaign to ban shark-fin soup are an environmental organisation against the practice of ‘fiinning’. More details about finning here.

Ad from ACAP, the Active Conservation Awareness Program of Wildaid. Name of the restaurant on the sign above the door is a typical name for a shark’s fin restaurant, “King of Shark’s Fins”
Copy:
 ”Every year, more than 100 million sharks are slaughtered by pretentiousness.”
Agency JWT Shanghai

[Thanks Marc Wang]

King of shark’s fins at Houtlust CBS News Story about Shark Fin and Mercury Poison

Yes, avoid eating bear meat people it might injure you…or perhaps just don’t kill the bear in the first place and everyone involved carries on happy. In the following story a wildlife warden is in trouble for not putting down a bear because when released full of tranquilizers the meat might harm people…

Saving a sick black bear found Saturday in downtown Grants Pass has a local animal rehabilitator under investigation for possibly breaking wildlife rules while state biologists scramble to warn hunters against eating the bear’s tainted meat.

Wildlife Images Executive Director David Siddon acknowledged he did not receive Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife permission to release the bear Saturday near Galice after it was tranquilized and treated for an abscessed paw.

He couldn’t, Siddon said, because the local ODFW office is closed on weekends and he had to do something with the 147-pound bruin when it awoke from the tranquilizer cocktail used to capture it in a downtown alley.

“We had no place to hold it,” Siddon said. “The only other option was to kill the thing, and it didn’t seem like the right thing to do. This sounded like the best thing to do at the time,”.

But biologists said his actions violated the ODFW’s policy against releasing sick or injured bears over health and safety issues, especially injured adults.

“This bear could not have qualified for relocation,” ODFW wildlife biologist Mark Vargas said. “Our policy is this bear would have been euthanized.”

One of the tranquilizers used could linger in the bear’s system for as long as 30 days, so the meat could sicken someone if they shot and ate it before the end of bear season Dec. 31, Vargas said.

The Oregon State Police, whose troopers were present when the bear was darted, are investigating whether state wildlife regulations were violated.

Siddon downplayed the potential health impacts of eating the meat and said he’s just glad the bear survived.

“In a perfect world, this would have had a happy ending,” Siddon said. “But it’s us getting entangled in bureaucracy instead of good judgment.”

The bear was a non-lactating female with cinnamon-colored fur. When released eight miles up Bear Camp Road near Galice, the bear had spots of shaved hair on its right rear, its lower left rear leg and right front leg.

Any hunter who shoots the bear was urged to telephone a local ODFW office before consuming the meat, which could hold tranquilizer residue in its tissues for weeks.

One of the tranquilizers used was called xylazine. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recommends waiting 30 days before killing an animal who has been tranquilized with xylazine and consuming the meat.

A second drug used, called telazol, has an FDA-recommended withdrawal period of 14 days. The third, called ketamine, has a three-day withdrawal period.

Medical Web sites say xylazine has been known to cause dizziness, chills and heart palpitations in humans, but cases of human ingestion are rare.

Siddon disputed the health concerns.

“If that dose would only keep a 147-pound bear down two hours long … I can’t imagine it could be a legitimate worry,” Siddon said.

The bear could be miles from its release site by now if healthy, or it could be lingering in the area if not, Vargas said.

The saga began at 8:30 a.m. Saturday when Siddon received a call from the OSP seeking help in removing an apparently sick and lethargic bear from an alley near the intersection of Seventh and F streets in Grants Pass.

Siddon, along with a veterinarian and a Wildlife Images assistant, went to the alley, darted the bear and loaded it in an SUV to be hauled to Siddon’s facility in Merlin for treatment.

Siddon said he was “pretty clear right off that bat” that Wildlife Images had no room for the bear and he was “pretty sure” he said it might be released, not killed.

Siddon said he does not recall troopers at the scene objecting. Siddon also said he believed the OSP would be “the next level of authority” under the ODFW for release permission in this case.

OSP Lt. Jeff Williams said Tuesday that the discussions between Siddon and the troopers will be part of their investigation.

“My understanding, from my sergeant, is that he was advised to consult with the ODFW, but I have not talked to the troopers (involved),” Williams said.

The troopers, Marty Marchand and Brad Bennett, were unavailable for comment Tuesday.

Vargas said he learned about the bear Monday morning from a weekend fax sent by an OSP dispatcher. When he learned from Wildlife Images that the animal was released, he notified state police, Vargas said.

Tom Thornton, the ODFW’s game program manager, said Siddon knows that “biologists need to make that call” whether to release a captured bear.

In general, violating the policy could lead to a review of Wildlife Images’ wildlife rehabilitation license, but Thornton said it was “premature” to determine whether a review will be conducted.

Siddon said the ODFW should have handled the entire response.

“There’s nobody working at (ODFW) on weekends, bottom line,” Siddon said. “We were just trying to help everybody.”

Reach reporter Mark Freeman - mfreeman@mailtribune.com.

Campaigning has to grow with the modern world; here is a film that has been made about the damage to everybody of the bushmeat trade. It is being shown on big screen tvs in rural Africa…

Anti-bushmeat campaign goes cinematic

Conservationists in Africa have long fought a losing battle to end the illegal and dangerous trade in bushmeat but one group is now hoping for better results from a cinematic campaign in Kenya.

“Carcasses,” a new film that debuted last week, aims to educate rural communities about the devastating consequences to health, wildlife and food security posed by the indiscriminate killing of animals for food.

The hour-long short feature, produced by the British-based Born Free Foundation, depicts one such community in Kenya struggling to survive after the wildlife on which it has depended for decades are hunted to extinction.

The foundation, named for the book and film by naturalist Joy Adamson about the lioness Elsa in central Kenya’s Rift Valley, intends to take the movie on a travelling road show to a dozen villages in rural Kenya in the coming weeks.

It hopes the drama and Kiswahili dialogue will register with villagers in a way that dry lectures condemning poaching from stern wildlife rangers or enthusiastic European animal rights activists may have failed.
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