meat is murder

More farmers going out of business as their meat trade becomes uneconomical. More biarre speciesism as states ban horse slaughter but allow other routine murder of farm animals to continue. More evidence of the abuses of modern farming

STAFFORDSVILLE, Ky. — The bidding for the black pony started at $500, then took a nose dive. [src]

There were no takers at $300, $200, even $100. With a high bid of just $75, the auctioneer gave the seller the choice of taking the animal off the auction block. But the seller said no.

“I can’t feed a horse,” the man said. “I can’t even feed myself.”

Kentucky, the horse capital of the world, is being overrun with thousands of horses no one wants–some of them healthy, but many of them starved and broken-down. Other parts of the country are overwhelmed too.

The reason: opposition to the slaughter of horses for human consumption overseas.

Public backlash–and state bans of slaughters or the threat of them–have led to the closing of several slaughterhouses that used to take in horses no longer suitable for racing or work. Auction houses are glutted with horses, and many rescue organizations have run out of room.

Horses have been reported chained in eastern Kentucky and left for days without food or water. Others have been turned loose in the countryside.

It is legal in all states for owners to shoot their unwanted horses. But it can cost as much as $150 for a veterinarian to put a horse down, and disposing of the carcass can be costly. Many places ban the burying of horses because of pollution fears.

Sending horses to a glue factory isn’t an option; adhesives are mostly synthetic nowadays, said Lawrence Sloan of the Adhesive and Sealant Council. And because of public opposition, horse meat is no longer turned into dog food, said Christopher Heyde of the Society for Animal Protective Legislation.

Anti-slaughter groups insist the market eventually will sort itself out, meaning fewer unwanted horses.

“I can’t absorb the price,” said Nelson Francis, who raises gaited horses. “You try to hang on until the price changes, but it looks like it’s not going to. . . . What do I do? I’ve got good quality horses I can’t market.”

“Kill buyers” formerly paid pennies a pound for unwanted horses; they packed them into trucks bound for slaughterhouses, which would ship the horse meat to Europe and Asia.

However, public opposition to the eating of horse meat has caused the number of horses slaughtered each year in America to drop to about 90,000 in 2005 from more than 300,000 in 1990, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Only one–in DeKalb, Ill.–still butchers horses for human consumption.

“What do you do with them all?” said Lori Neagle, executive director of the new Kentucky Equine Humane Center in Lexington. “What do you do with 90,000 head of horses?”

California expressly bans horse slaughter; similar measures are under consideration in Kentucky, Maryland, New York and Illinois. Meanwhile, as the market price for horses has plummeted, the cost of food, lodging and health care has not.

Kathleen Schwartz, director of Days End Farm Horse Rescue in Lisbon, Md., which adopts abused and neglected horses, said rescue operations that choose not to euthanize horses are generally full.

“We had one horse . . . that was a rack of bones–in pain from starvation and parasite infestation and injury,” Schwartz said. “His owner thought life was better than going to slaughter. Well, life is–if you’re going to feed it and take care of it.”

Some mad as a loon speciesism here. Or not speciesism really, just society placed attitudes that highlight how contradictory people are when they decide to take pleasure in the flesh of a fellow creature. A butcher who is advertising like crazy to sell as many wild rabbit bodies as he can is very quick to state that he won’t sell tame rabbits. Well that’s all right then. So long as only the rabbits miss a family member, not the little kid down the road. He then boasts how he wouldn’t sell roadkill. No, they have to be deprived of life specially for him to sell them. What a sick, sad world this is.

A Bletchley-based butcher has received a good response after placing an ad in the local paper asking for people to supply him with dead wild rabbits as he can not keep up with customer demand.

Malcolm Driver, from DP Clarke butchers Queensway, near Milton Keynes, said he was only interested in taking wild rabbits from those who are licensed to shoot them.

Since placing the unusual ad in the paper, which read ‘wild rabbits required’, Malcolm said he had received much media attention which had resulted in increased numbers of wild rabbits being brought into the shop.

“I have sold 80 extra rabbits since Friday last week and they all went during Saturday and Sunday morning,” Malcolm said.

He added he was due to receive another couple of 100 rabbits yesterday.

“I’ve always sold wild rabbit. I can sell 500 a week and in the last six to seven months I have got busier with them,” he said.

Malcolm attributed the increased interest in wild rabbit to a growing multi-cultural society and changes in what consumers choose to eat.

“People are realising that rabbit meat is low fat, tender, very tasty - and a cheap option.

“I certainly remember my mum baking rabbit pies, and they tasted superb,” he said.

He sells three ready-skinned rabbits for £5 and will pay his suppliers £1.50 each for them.

Malcolm said: “They are mainly from farmers or from people that manage golf courses or people who have shot rabbits on their own land.

“I don’t touch roadkill and I certainly would never contemplate tame rabbits.”

For those out there that haven’t seen it, here is Earthlings on Google Video.

The BBC reported this story about a rottweiler taking over the mothering of two new borm lambs. These are perculiar stories where everyone who reads the piece says, ‘Aaah’ and feels good about the world. They then eat lamb on Sunday, totally putting the contrasting feelings towards the preservation of young, cute life and eating a big meal, into seperate compartments.

They have a fearsome reputation, but one Rottweiler is proving that the breed has a softer side by helping to rear two lambs.

Molly has been using her maternal instincts after lambs Lucky and Charm were born with complications on a farm. Her owner Maria Foster, 38, from Forden, near Welshpool in Powys, said Molly slept with the pair at night, and even protected them from other animals.
 
Lucky and Charm are recovering and will be placed in a field in about 10 days. Ms Foster said the pair needed help to improve their circulation soon after they were born. They were placed in an Aga oven for warmth and after being lifted out Molly took over and started licking them as a ewe would have done.
 
“The first 12 to 24 hours for a lamb are absolutely crucial and if Molly hadn’t been doing what she was doing, I would have had to have been there rubbing the lambs through most of the night to keep their circulation going,”
said Ms Foster.

“She could have ignored them but she didn’t and it is quite comical to see.”

Now 11-month-old Molly is like a mother to the two lambs, who stick closely to their unlikely guardian. Ms Foster added:

“The cat came into the kitchen the other day and walked over to the bucket where the lambs were sleeping, but Molly pushed her away as if to say: ‘They are mine.’ “She will let the sheepdog have a look, but only for so long before she pushes him away as well.”

Ms Foster said they cannot be returned to their mother because they would be rejected by her after so long apart. A spokesman for the Kennel Club, which organises Crufts, said:

 ”Rottweilers were originally bred as guard dogs in Germany, but in the right hands they should not pose a problem. They are not born aggressive, they learn it from us. Nonetheless, it’s certainly the first time I’ve ever heard of a Rottweiler caring for lambs.”

BBC

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.