meat is murder

Cloned Animal Meat is back on the news agenda again (see this Daily Mail article as an example). Seemingly little by little, it is mentioned more and more often so that it becomes background noise and something that may be seen as inevitable.
Allowed in North and South America, and Asia, but essentially prohibited in Europe, cloned meat production keeps making the news.
Studies tend to be heralded discussing the impact to human health with no discussion given over to the consequences to the animals involved - or to food security.

CIWF state:

Research shows that cloned animals frequently die from heart failure, respiratory problems, and defective immune systems. Cloning also magnifies the worst selective breeding practices of industrial farming: Animals pushed genetically to unnaturally high yields and rapid growth suffer debilitating physical ailments.

Cloning is likely to be used to produce copies of the highest yielding and fastest growing of these animals, and could escalate factory farming to a new and alarming level.

The RSPCA state:

Fewer than five per cent of cloned embryos usually survive to birth.

Where animals are born alive, they often have breathing problems, tumours, liver defects or other abnormalities, and have a reduced lifespan.

An American animal advocacy organization, Mercy For Animals, has been able to gain undercover footage of the practices of commercial chicken hatcheries. Please watch and if you are not yet vegan, think about what your money supports the next time you buy an egg or a product containing egg.
…lovely.

Thrown, dropped, mutilated, and ground-up alive. This is the shocking reality faced by hundreds of thousands of chicks each day at the world’s largest egg-laying breed hatchery – Hy-Line International in Spencer, Iowa.

New hidden camera footage obtained at this facility during a Mercy For Animals undercover investigation gives a disturbing glimpse into the cruel and industrialized reality of modern hatcheries.

The warm, comforting, and protective wings of these newly hatched chicks’ mothers have been replaced with massive machines, quickly moving conveyor belts, harsh handling, and distressing noise. These young animals are sorted, discarded, and handled like mere cogs in a machine.

For the nearly 150,000 male chicks who hatch every 24 hours at this Hy-Line facility, their lives begin and end the same day. Grabbed by their fragile wings by workers known as “sexers,” who separate males from females, these young animals are callously thrown into chutes and hauled away to their deaths. They are destined to die on day one because they cannot produce eggs and do not grow large or fast enough to be raised profitably for meat. Their lives are cut short when they are dropped into a grinding machine – tossed around by a spinning auger before being torn to pieces by a high-pressure macerator.

Over 30 million male chicks meet their fate this way each year at this facility.

For the surviving females, this is the beginning of a life of cruelty and confinement at the hands of the egg industry. Before even leaving the hatchery they will be snapped by their heads into a spinning debeaker – a portion of their sensitive beaks removed by a laser. Workers toss and rummage through them before they are placed 100 per crowded box and shipped across the country.

Remainder of article at MFA

Common sense and scientific reason has prevailed and the English badger cull has been cancelled due to the government considering an earlier, larger scale report that proved no conclusive link between badgers and bovine TB. This has aggravated farmers who are going to stamp and shout about it instead of putting their own house in order and improve the living conditions of and stop the movements of the animals in their charge. Or they could go one step further and just stand aside from the death industries altogether. (Badgers and Bovine TB information at Animal Aid.)

From the bbc

The government has decided against a cull of badgers in England to control TB in cattle, the BBC understands.Its decision goes against former chief scientific adviser Sir David King’s recommendations, made in 2007, that a cull could be an effective measure.
The decision has angered the National Farmers’ Union, which claims cattle TB has already cost the industry millions. In April a “targeted cull” of badgers was announced in Wales as part of a plan to eradicate TB in cattle.

But ministers have instead accepted the scientific arguments of the Independent Scientific Group on TB in Cattle.
NFU president Peter Kendall told BBC News that Westminster had “ducked the issue” and that the union would be organising a protest outside Parliament next week. A policy announcement is due on Monday. The ISG’s analysis - an earlier and much larger study than Sir David’s - concluded that culling badgers would not be economic.

However the imminent remains.

The state of animals in farming is a shocking spectacle. Most people are able to live a life of deliberate ignorance and see meat wrapped in plastic or behind the glass of a deli counter and dis-associate it from the misery of the living being that was the meat before the plastic. The horror of animal farming was highlighted in today’s Independent as they were passed photographs from an Animal Aid undercover investigation.

Government vets have launched an investigation into Britain’s pig farming industry after disturbing images showing dead and diseased animals were passed to The Independent.

Pork farmers have been conducting a high-profile advertising campaign to encourage consumers to buy more expensive British produce, claiming that standards are higher than they are on the Continent. But the images, taken at farms linked to leaders of the industry, raise serious concerns about the welfare of the majority of the country’s 8 million pigs.

Vets at the Government’s Animal Health agency, which enforces welfare legislation and conducts regular inspections of farm premises, said it would investigate the findings.

Activists from the welfare group Animal Aid entered 10 farms in March and April. Two of the farms were operated by companies run by members of the industry’s governing body the British Pig Executive (BPEX), while others were linked to other senior figures in the industry. 

Animal Aid claimed its investigation showed that farmers were “falling considerably short” of the images it portrayed in its campaigning. Shot in Cornwall, Somerset, Lincolnshire, North and East Yorkshire, the footage shows pigs with sores where they have rubbed against metal bars; farrowing crates that prevent sows from moving; pigs with bite marks; collapsed and convulsing animals; pigs covered in excrement; dirty pens; and routine tail-docking.

remainder of article at the Independent

• More than nine million pigs are slaughtered annually in the UK.
• Around 450,000 sows are currently used for breeding.
• Seventy per cent of British pigmeat comes from animals reared intensively, but even ‘outdoor reared’ and ‘outdoor raised’ pigs spend half or more of their lives indoors.
• Britain’s modest advances in pig welfare have not been made alone, and this country is certainly not in the vanguard. Sweden, for example, banned tethering almost three decades before Britain. And in 1997, Switzerland banned the use of farrowing crates altogether, making nonsense of Britain?s claims that we lead the way. In Sweden, weaning takes place at 5-6 weeks, an improvement on Britain and yet still far short of the17 weeks that pigs suckle and nurse their young in semi-natural conditions. The tethering of sows is now banned across the entire EU. Sow stalls are banned in Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden and Finland, as well as Britain. In 2013 they will be illegal across the whole of the EU. In Sweden, all pigs must be provided with straw or other litter material ? something that British pigs are largely denied. And pigs on Swedish farms may be held in a farrowing crate for a maximum of one week. In Britain, it is four weeks. Norway will enforce a ban on the castration of piglets from 2009 ? something which, although only rarely carried out in the UK, has not been outlawed here.

Yippee! Cattle farmers have found a way of crossing the species barrier and causing suffering and death to other animals. Yes, it’s time to blame bovine TB not on poor animal husbandry and the movement of cattle but instead on badgers. Why spend effort on putting your own house in order - or even stop earning blood money altogether - when you can lobby the governemt to cull a protected species instead.

Badgers are set to be killed in an attempt to stamp out tuberculosis in cattle.

They are a protected species in the UK but have a bad reputation with some farmers.

Bovine TB is proving a big problem in Wales with over 8,000 affected cattle having to be killed over the last year

Bovine TB is proving a big problem in Wales with over 8,000 affected cattle having to be killed over the last year.

Farmers are blaming the spread of the disease on badgers and in response the Welsh Assembly has made a controversial decision to test how widespread the problem is by setting up a pilot cull zone.

While many farmers have welcomed the decision, the RSPCA described it as going against sound scientific judgement.

Officials say bovine TB is out of control in Wales, but conservation groups insist a badger cull will not stop it spreading.

The method and a site with suitable natural or man-made boundaries have not be chosen. Other areas could be considered after the pilot is reviewed.

In a statement Wales’s Rural Affairs Minister Elin Jones said: “This is a difficult decision to take and it has not been taken lightly. I am very aware of the strong views on this issue.”

She made clear that badgers would remain a protected species and said she had given “due consideration to the divergence of scientific and political opinion”, adding “illegal action will not be tolerated.”

Ms Jones said she wanted to reform the compensation system for farmers whose infected cows were slaughtered to “encourage herd owners to comply with legal and best practice requirements”.

Last year, 7,905 cattle were put down in Wales, up from 669 in 1997. A compensation bill for affected farms of £15.2 million in 2007 would grow to more than £30 million by 2012 if it continued at the present “unsustainable” rate, she added.

Source of article above was ITN

Please see stopwaronbadgers and badger-killers for arguments aginst the cull of badgers.
A sample argument is given below.

Badgers are being scapegoated by DEFRA (formerly the Ministry of Agriculture) to placate the farming lobby, whose own intensive production systems are the direct cause of increasing levels of disease in cattle, including bovine TB. There is no plausible evidence to suggest that badgers are transmitting bovine TB to cattle. The reverse is probably the case.

The persistent focus on badgers distracts from the serious health problems faced by intensively managed cattle in Britain. Many other diseases, such as pneumonia, E. coli, coccidiosis (a fatal diarrhoea), salmonella and mastitis, are also increasing in British cattle herds.

Bovine TB is caused by intensive farming methods, >NOT badgers!

Background - In 1973 a dead badger was found on a farm in Gloucestershire that had recently suffered an outbreak of bovine tuberculosis (bTB) within its cattle herd. Upon post-mortem examination the badger revealed a large number of lesions throughout its body, which tested positive for bTB. MAFF (now DEFRA) first started to kill badgers (using cyanide gas) as a means of ‘controlling’ Bovine TB (bTB) in 1975. But since 1982 badgers have been cage-trapped in Britain where they remain until operatives return to shoot them. In Ireland they are caught in cruel snares.

Since then the badger has become a farming and government scapegoat for what is a bovine disease and over *30,000 badgers have been killed in unfruitful, pointless ‘experiments’. (*Up to 1995) And once again starting in 1998 badgers were killed…

Farmers insist that badgers transmit the disease to cattle, and yet not even farmer-friendly DEFRA has produced any convincing evidence. During the past 28 years, DEFRA (and formerly MAFF) has up to now killed more than 40,000 badgers in a failed effort to halt bovine TB outbreaks. In fact, TB in cattle has been increasing since 1986, including in areas where badgers have been eliminated, or where they have been shown to be free of the disease.

It’s been quite a week…
we’ve had pig farmers storming London because pig farming is expensive and they don’t earn enough money (stop doing it then), Japan fighting for support of whaling within the IWC (for a change), and the Sea Shepherd crew have reported at being shot at by Japanese whalers.
As usual at meatismurder, a caveat must be added to the whaling stories below - we report on the death of whales with the same passion and concern as we would report the death of cows or chickens as they are all sentient beings who deserve to not be caught in a machine of profit and greed.

Some 500 pig farmers and pig industry workers descended on Whitehall today to hand in a petition about the crisis threatening their industry.

Demonstrators from the National Pig Association protest in London
Demonstrators from the National Pig Association protest in Whitehall to demand a fair price from supermarkets

The campaigners include Jimmy Doherty, the TV pig farmer and friend of Jamie Oliver who is having to cut his rare-breed herd of breeding sows from 95 to 30 because of the rising price of feed.

Pig farmers say they are losing about £26 on every pig sold for slaughter in Britain because pig feed has gone up from around £130 to £225 a ton in the past year.

But while wholesale grain costs have doubled they claim supermarkets have not increased farm gate prices accordingly.

Winnie the Pig, a veteran of a similar campaign in 2001, also joined the Pigs are Worth It! rally outside Downing Street.

From the Telegraph

Japan has denied claims it fired bullets at anti-whaling protesters in the Southern Ocean.

Environmental activist group Sea Shepherd accuses Japanese Coast Guard officers of firing stun grenades and rifles during clashes today in the Southern Ocean.

Captain of the Sea Shepherd ship, Paul Watson, says he found a bullet lodged in the the bullet-proof vest he was wearing and that one of his crew was hit by a grenade and received minor injuries.

But Japan’s Government denies that, saying it only launched “noise balls” - loud explosive deterrent devices - after repeated attacks on its whaling ship by Sea Shepherd.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Tomohiko Taniguchi says no shots were fired.

From ABCNews

Japan is looking for new supporters of its pro-whaling stance ahead of a major meeting on the future of the International Whaling Commission (IWC).

A one-day seminar on Monday brought delegates from 12 developing countries, most of them not IWC members, to Tokyo to discuss “sustainable use” of whales.

An official told the BBC that Japan hoped these nations would join the IWC.

On Thursday, the IWC begins a three-day meeting in London aiming to plot a new course for the fractured organisation.

We want the idea of sustainable use to be understood by as many countries as possible
Ryotaro Suzuki
Japan Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Officially charged with the effective regulation of commercial whaling, many of its member countries would prefer its central remit to become conservation of the “great whales” and their close relatives such as dolphins and porpoises, with virtually all hunting banned.

But Japan, Norway, Iceland and their allies in the pro-sustainable use bloc argue that there is no reason in principle why whales cannot be hunted like other wild creatures, provided quotas are small enough to be sustainable.

Japan believes the western love of whales is culturally specific
In recent years, both camps have sought to bring new member countries into the IWC to bolster their numbers.

At the 2006 annual meeting, the pro-whalers achieved superiority for the first time in 20 years with the passing of a resolution asking for the eventual return of commercial hunting.

By last year’s meeting, enough new anti-whaling countries had joined to give this bloc the upper hand once more.

Both blocs continue to lobby potential new allies - hence Japan’s decision to host Monday’s seminar looking at the sustainable use of cetaceans.

Some of the 12 countries attending, such as Palau and Cambodia, are already IWC members; but most, including Angola, Eritrea and Micronesia, are not.

From the BBC