meat is murder

Like with Monday’s post, I’ve spent the day watching people get upset by what foreign people do to beautiful animals…

Iceland criticised for hunting whales, defying Global Moratorium

REYKJAVIK, (AND) The government of Iceland has announced today that it will commercially hunt whales for the first time in more than two decades, contravening a moratorium established in 1986 by the International Whaling Commission

(IWC). The announcement has drawn sharp criticism from the global community including the UK government, which today called on Iceland to reconsider its decision, and experts with IFAW (International Fund for Animal Welfare).

The announcement was made by Iceland’s Ministry of Fisheries, which said permits had been granted for the commercial hunting of 30 minke whales and nine endangered fin whales.

While Iceland has not officially hunted whales commercial over the last two decades, it has hunted whales for what it calls “scientific” purposes that are allowable through an IWC loophole — though the meat from the whales is sold commercially within Iceland — generating outcry from both the global conservation and scientific communities.

In criticizing Iceland’s decision to resume the commercial hunting of whales, the U.K. government noted today in an official statement that: “Few Icelanders eat whale meat regularly; there is limited, if any, world market for the meat; and there is little scientific support for the theory that whales have a significant impact on the depletion of fish stocks.

Furthermore, a growing number of jobs in Iceland depend on the developing whale-watching industry. In the past year, thousands of visitors from overseas (over 70.000 were British) have experienced the joy and excitement of sailing off the coast of Iceland to see whales swimming in their natural habitat.” IFAW’s Director of Wildlife and Habitat Protection, Dr. Joth Singh, agreed, saying, “Commercial whaling is an out-dated and unnecessary industry that should have ended a century ago with the use of whale oil lamps.

The government of Iceland should be supporting its nation’s thriving and growing whale watching industry rather than sinking money and its political reputation into promoting the hunting of whales.” Recent Gallup polling commissioned by IFAW confirmed how unnecessary commercial whaling is to Iceland, revealing that only 1.1 percent of Icelanders eat whale meat once a week or more, while 82.4 percent of 16 to 24-year-olds never eat whale meat.

Contact:
Jennifer Ferguson-Mitchell - 508-737-1584
or
Michele Duff - 508-744-2235
both of the International Fund for Animal Welfare

But everyone who is appalled by this activity will equally happily tuck into a Sunday roast or grab a quick pasty at lunchtime; we’re back to that old argument again that if abbatoirs had glass walls (or newspaper campaigns) everyone would be a vegetarian…

The slaughter of farmed animals in the UK

In the UK, there are over 350 licenced slaughterhouses. Secrecy surrounds the killing business and individuals and animal welfare organisations are rarely permitted to visit slaughterhouses. Even the government’s own advisory body, the

Farm Animal Welfare Council, has been refused access to some of the larger plants.

Viva! has been able to obtain video footage of stunning and killing and we have also reviewed the latest scientific research on slaughter. As a result, we have built up an extremely disturbing picture of the reality of Britain’s killing factories.

How many animals are killed?

The total number of animals killed in British slaughterhouses in 2003 was approximately 900 million.

This included 9.35 million pigs, nearly 15 million sheep, 28 million turkeys, 20 million ducks, over 850 million chickens and 2.25 million cattle.

This equates to 2.4 million animals slaughtered every day; 100,000 an hour; 1600 per minute and 26 every second +++

People won’t like this photo that’s in the news at the moment…

Photo taken October 13, 2006. REUTERS/Stringer (PHILIPPINES)
Some 80 dogs, that were muzzled and found in a vehicle which was intercepted by enforcement officers, are seen crammed in a crate in Baguio City, north of Manila
October 13, 2006. Authorities said the dogs were to be delivered to a restaurant in Benguet, north of Manila.
But are happy to pay for this…

Packed into crates on trucks that typically carry around 6,000 birds, the journey to the slaughterhouse can be horrific.
Each year in the EU alone, up to 33 million chickens may die en-route to slaughter.
The dead-on-arrival figures are only the tip of the iceberg. Many of those that survive suffer terribly from extremes of temperature (bitter cold in winter, suffocating heat in summer), broken bones and bruises.
During the journey the birds experience sudden jolting movements, vibration, loud noises, deprivation of water and food and overcrowding. All these can lead to distress and extreme fear.
and this…

Cattle who survive feedlots, dairy sheds, and veal farms face a hellish trip to the slaughterhouse. The animals are packed onto trucks where they go without food for duration of the journey, which sometimes takes days. In hot weather, many cows collapse in the heat, and in the cold, cows sometimes freeze to the sides of the truck until workers pry them off with crowbars.
Cows who are too sick or injured to walk, known as “downers,” may have ropes or chains tied around their legs so that they can be dragged onto and off of the trucks. According to former Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, roughly 400,000 “dead and dying” cattle are forced onto trucks bound for slaughter each year.
Former USDA veterinary inspector Dr. Lester Friedlander explains, “In the summertime, when it’s 90, 95 degrees, they’re transporting cattle from 1,200 to 1,500 miles away on a trailer, 40 to 45 head crammed in there, and some collapse from heat exhaustion. This past winter, we had minus-50 degree weather with the windchill. Can you imagine if you were in the back of a trailer that’s open, and the windchill factor is minus-50 degrees, and that trailer is going 50 to 60 miles an hour? The animals are urinating and defecating right in the trailers, and after a while, it’s going to freeze, and their hooves are right in it. If they go down—well, you can imagine lying in there for 10 hours on a trip.” more

Slaughterhouse Worker Turned Activist
UPC Talks with Virgil Butler and Laura Alexander

Photo By: Karen Davis

In testimony given via PETA in January 2003, Virgil Butler documented the horrific treatment of chickens that he witnessed every night while working at the Tyson chicken slaughterhouse in Grannis, Arkansas from 1997 to 2002. His testimony and ongoing website revelations resulted in a front-page article in the Los Angeles Times on December 8, 2003, “A Killing Floor Chronicle.” On August 21, 2004, at UPC’s 5 th Annual Forum in Norfolk, Va., Virgil gave his first conference presentation about his Tyson experience, “Inside Tyson’s Hell – Why I Got Out of the Chicken Slaughtering Business.”
In the interview that follows, Virgil and his partner, Laura Alexander, talk about their relationship to the chicken industry, and to each other, and how their relationship influenced Virgil to become, in his words, “a slaughterhouse worker turned activist.”

Q. Virgil, please describe your job at Tyson when you first met Laura.
A. I worked on back dock, where I hung live chickens in the shackles and worked the kill floor. I was lead hanger for the last few years, so it was also my job to teach new-hires how to hang and kill chickens. In the hanging cage, I stood on a line with six other guys where we took live chickens off the belt and hung them by their legs upside down in the metal shackles. The line goes by at about 182-186 birds per minute, so a hanger must be able to hang 26-30 birds per minute. As lead hanger, it was also my job to catch the empty shackles that the new-hires would miss. I spent so much time catching empty shackles and one-leggers (birds hung by only one leg), that I didn’t have much time to train anybody to do anything.
Some nights I worked in the kill room. The killer slits the throats of the chickens that the killing machine misses. You stand there with a very sharp 6-inch knife and catch as many birds as you can that the machine misses because the ones you miss go straight into the scalder alive. You have to cut both carotid arteries and the jugular vein for the chicken to die and bleed out before hitting the scalder. This requires quite a bit of skill and entails quite a bit of risk. It’s the most dangerous job in that department. All but one of the most serious accidents I saw the whole time I worked for Tyson occurred in the kill room due to the killer having to cut the throat of a one-legger. Some of those accidents happened to me. I have scars all over my hands from working the kill floor.
The killing room was worse than the hanging cage. It really does something to your mind when you stand there in all that blood, killing so many times, over and over again. The blood can get deep enough to go over the top of a 9-inch set of rubber boots – I have seen blood clots so big that it took three big men to push them. You have to stomp them to break them up to get them to go down the drain. That can happen in just 2 ½ hours. We filled up a diesel tanker truck with blood every night in one shift. I have actually had to wipe blood clots out of my eyes. Working as a killer was what I hated the most. But since I was good at it, that was where I got sent a good bit of the time.
Q. How did meeting Laura affect your attitude toward your work? What happened, and why?
A. My attitude changed in such a way as to make me not want to go to work anymore. I would start finding excuses not to go. I got sick of it, even literally. I was constantly getting sick all the time for the last year or so. And I started feeling ashamed. I didn’t want Laura to know what I did, the specifics of it. I had told all of my co-workers not to talk about anything that happened down there, in front of her. Laura cares so much about animals – all animals – that I just knew she would be horrified at what I was a part of.
Q. At our Forum, Laura, you mentioned your feelings the first time you accompanied Virgil to the slaughter plant. Please tell us about those feelings and about the impact they had on you and on your relationship with Virgil.
A. I had been to the plant before, but only in the parking lot. Even there, though, you could just feel a certain wrongness in the air or something. But one time we went down to pick up one of Virgil’s paychecks from when he had been off work sick. It was right before the shift started, so the plant wasn’t running yet. I asked Virgil to take me back to the hanging cage where he worked so I could see for myself what it looked like.
You know, I had prepared myself to feel disgusted, sad, and uncomfortable, but nothing could have prepared me for the way I felt when I saw it. It’s kind of hard to express in words, but it was like this wave – this wall – of negative energy hitting me in the face when we opened that door. The only thing I can even try to compare it to would be that feeling you get in places like hospitals and jails, where there is suffering and death, dread and fear. You know what I mean? Well, take that feeling and magnify it by at least 10 and you will have maybe an inkling of what I felt at the door of that room that day. I couldn’t leave fast enough.
I talked about it all the way home in the truck. I didn’t realize it then, but I remember now: Virgil just sat over there in the passenger seat with his head down, listening to me spew all this as we went down the road. I was just so outraged and loud about it. I found out later from him that that was the night he knew he couldn’t do that work anymore. That he was terribly ashamed of what he did. Things got a bit rocky after that for quite some time, almost as if he was trying to get me to reject him and not want anything to do with him anymore.
Of course, that behavior had the opposite effect on me. All it did was to make me feel worse for him and understand more about what had made him feel so tormented in the first place. And that made me even more determined to see it through and try to help heal him. It was so heartbreaking to think that he had subjected himself to that life for so long, and that he thought that was all he was good for, all he could do, and that he was doomed. My heart went out to him. It ultimately brought us closer. And that closeness enabled him to finally tell me – and then the world. I could tell Virgil wasn’t really a bad person, not deep down. He was just lost.
Q. Virgil, one of the most powerful things you describe in your writing is making eye contact with the chickens on the slaughter line and seeing their terror. When did you start to connect with the chickens that way? Was there a time when you didn’t “see” them, but then you did? Was there a time when you saw their suffering but didn’t care, but then you did care? What happened?
A. I felt that connection from the first night I killed. That’s part of what made the job so hard for me. I just suppressed how I felt because it would have been an unpopular opinion among the other workers. What happened was that this feeling just kept adding up and getting worse. By the time Laura came along, I was already pretty disgusted, but Laura helped me to finally make the move to walk away forever by going public. I knew that when I did that I could never go back. And that’s part of why I did go public. To make sure I never had that option again.
Also, once I came into contact with all of these other people who cared so deeply about animals, I felt like it would have been wrong for me not to jump in and help to do my part, especially since I was responsible for so much of the suffering they were fighting. It’s been a good way for me to work through the guilt that I accumulated for so many years, especially since I always knew that the work I was doing was wrong and just kept justifying my actions and kept on doing it.
Q. Is your change of heart unusual or unique in your opinion – an “isolated incident” so to speak? Or do you believe there are many slaughterhouse workers with similar feelings of compassion that are simply buried? If so, why? and what can be done to bring out this buried compassion?
A. My feelings aren’t that unique, I don’t think. I may have been one of the first to come forward, but I doubt I will be the last. I can see others coming out in the future. I have talked to a couple that want to. The main thing that keeps most workers silent is knowing that they will suffer through what I did in not being able to find work and having others still connected to Tyson shun them. I don’t know of a single person I ever talked to down there that liked the job. They are there because they feel they have no choice. If they had somewhere better to work they would leave in a heartbeat.
Q. Laura and Virgil, you are a team, are you not? Please tell us about your activism. What are you doing now, and what are your plans?
A. We are a team. We do everything together. Everything. We were already active in environmental issues before any of the animal rights stuff started. And we were already exploring spiritual healing and trying to be responsible citizens of the planet, like recycling and not being wasteful. Animal rights seems to round things out. Of course, we changed our diet. We couldn’t credibly criticize the abusive practices we were protesting against if we were still consuming the products of those practices. We just couldn’t look at a piece of meat anymore without seeing the sad, tortured face that was attached to it some time in the past.
For now, we intend to finish writing Virgil’s first book – the story of his transformation from killer to savior – and to keep making speaking engagements in an effort to make people more aware of the consequences of the choices they make on a daily basis. If people can start to realize they are being lied to by the poultry industry and the government, and that the horrible things we’ve described are not isolated in any way, we hope people will question the effect that their actions have on the world around them, especially on the innocent creatures who share it with us. We hope people will join us in changing their lives.
Virgil and Laura can be emailed at cybergypsy1964@yahoo.com.
To visit their website, click on www.cyberactivist.blogspot.com

Biggest Chicken Slaughterhouse in SE Europe

Bulgaria opened the biggest chicken slaughterhouse in Southeast Europe in the town of Stara Zagora, Darik News reported.
Bulgaria’s PM Sergey Stanishev opened the doors of the factory on an official ceremony.
The investment in the slaughterhouse amounts BNG 35 M and will provide job for 360 employers. It disposes of the most modern machinery in Europe.
The brothers Ivan and Luca Anguelovi won a program SAPARD project for BGN 4,264 M subsidies.
In a working hour the factory can process between 8000 and 9000 chickens.

EU Welfare - Ongoing Initiatives | United Poultry Concerns

In God’s Name - Religious Slaughter in the UK
from Viva

In Britain today, millions of farmed animals face having their throats cut while fully conscious – and it’s perfectly legal. The law states that animals must be stunned before they are killed in the abattoir but animals which are killed by Jewish and Moslem religious slaughter are exempt from that rule. Scientific evidence shows that these animals face severe pain and distress. The Government’s own advisory body, the Farm Animal Welfare Council, has recently called for the banning of religious slaughter. Viva! has opposed religious slaughter for many years.

Slaughter Without Prestunning

Although stunning before slaughter is often ineffective, slaughter without it is an excruciating and terrifying experience faced by millions of animals every year. At present the law exempts animals killed to provide Jewish shechita and Moslem halal meat from the requirement to be stunned: Viva! believes that law must be repealed as a matter of urgency.

Last year, the Farm Animal Welfare Council published its report on the welfare of animals at slaughter. This April, the Government has announced that it will not adopt the report’s recommendation that the practice of slaughter without prior stunning be banned completely. At present the practice is still permitted if animals are slaughtered to provide meat for the Jewish kosher and Muslim halal markets. Viva! condemns the failure of the Government to ban religious slaughter without prestunning.

All food animals in Britain are killed by having their throats cut but the law requires that they are first rendered unconscious. However, animals killed for Muslim halal and Jewish kosher meats, can be slaughtered by throat cutting without prestunning. Research shows that it can take a cow 60 seconds to lose consciousness – a calf twice this time. The Government has, in fact, accepted FAWC’s conclusion that animals slaughtered without prestunning are likely to experience “very significant pain and distress …” before they become unconscious. Approximately 10 million animals per year are killed in this way – around eight million for the halal market and over two million for the kosher market.

It is important to note that the exemption from stunning for religious slaughter is based upon the principle that “unnecessary suffering” should not be caused, however animals are slaughtered. The recognition that “very significant pain and distress” is “likely” to be caused by slaughter without prestunning thus calls into question the entire legal basis of the existing exemption and the Government has so far failed to address it.

The Government’s detailed position is established in their “Draft Response” to the FAWC report, published on April 1st. Considering their welcome – if long overdue - acceptance of FAWC’s conclusion that this is a serious welfare problem, their unwillingness to take any positive action seems particularly unjustifiable. The Government has refused to take action on the grounds that to ban slaughter without prestunning would impose on religious freedom and would also lead to importation of meat from animals slaughtered in this way, thus “exporting” the problem.

Viva! of course, supports the principle of multiculturalism and deplores racism absolutely but we also believe that this kind of suffering should not be tolerated for any reason. Since publication of the FAWC report last year, Viva! has led the campaign against slaughter without prestunning, a campaign which has included publishing an opinion poll revealing that over 70 per cent of the British population want to see an end to it; tabling a Parliamentary Early Day Motion (No 104) which has been signed by 80 MPs; and producing a detailed report on the subject. Viva! rejects the Government’s arguments for the following reasons:

Other practices which may be undertaken for religious reasons – such as polygamy or the stoning of adulterers – are not permitted in the UK. Religious freedom does not override other moral considerations and the suffering caused by this form of slaughter is so severe that it cannot be allowed to prevent action being taken.
Over 90 per cent of animals slaughtered for halal meat in the UK are already stunned before slaughter, demonstrating widespread acceptance of the practice within the Muslim community. Similarly, many people within the Jewish community do not support slaughter without prestunning. Many Muslims and Jews are also vegetarian, indicating that the consumption of meat slaughtered in any particular fashion is not central to their religious beliefs. Banning slaughter without prestunning would not stop people from following the religious faiths of their choosing.
Bearing in mind the widespread acceptance of prestunning among Muslims and Jews, the banning of slaughter without prestunning in this country will not automatically lead to an equivalent amount of traditionally-slaughtered meat being imported: instead it is likely to encourage many people who currently eat meat from animals slaughtered in this way to change their dietary habits.
The Government has said only that it will seek certain small changes in practice on a voluntary basis. Viva! considers this a grossly inadequate response. At present, the Government is engaged in a consultation process which will last until July. After this process is complete, they will announce their final position. Viva! will take part in this consultation process and will attempt to obtain the best possible welfare outcome for animals. In the interim, we urge you to contact the Government to demand that they reverse their policy and introduce a ban. For contact details and specimen letters, click here.

Viva! opposes all slaughter and we promote vegetarianism as the only truly effective way to prevent animal suffering. Viva!’s investigations show that millions of animals slaughtered by conventional means are ineffectively, painfully or incompletely stunned – and the overwhelming majority of the 850 million killed each year lead lives of deprivation and suffering. To find out more about slaughter, click here.