HighestWelfare.Humane.Assured.GoodPractices.Vegetarian. Regenerative.Flexitarian.Lies...
What is the difference between No Welfare, High Welfare, and Highest Welfare when they all require animals to die? Only human comfort, NONE protect the actual animals. The most humane, ethical, and honest Webster-defined "welfare" is NOT exploiting animals - not using, not wearing, not eating, not killing - animals. The only meaningful position is vegan, everything else is just how humans euphemize animals' required suffering and violent deaths: no human exploits animals because they honestly believe that NOT exploiting animals is UNethical or INhumane.
Picture of brutality stirs Afghan debate
From The Age
She cannot read or write and had never heard of Time magazine until a visitor brought her a copy of this week’s issue, the one with the cover picture of her face – the face with no nose.
On Wednesday, Aisha, 18, left Kabul for a long-planned trip to the US for reconstructive surgery. A women’s shelter at a secret location in the capital has been her refuge for the past 10 months.
”I don’t know if [the magazine cover] will help other women or not,” she said, her hand going instinctively to cover the hole in the middle of her face, as it does whenever strangers look at her. ”I just want to get my nose back.”
Reaction to the Time cover has become something of a litmus test for attitudes towards the war and America’s responsibility in Afghanistan. Critics of the US presence in Afghanistan call it ”emotional blackmail” and even ”war porn”, while those who fear the consequences of abandoning Afghanistan see it as a powerful appeal to conscience.
The debate was fuelled in part by the language Time chose to accompany the photograph: ”What happens if we leave Afghanistan”, pointedly without a question mark.
”That is exactly what will happen,” said Manizha Naderi, referring to Aisha and cases like hers. An Afghan-American whose group, Women for Afghan Women, runs the shelter where Aisha stayed, Ms Naderi granted photographers access to Aisha.
”People need to see this and know what the cost will be to abandon this country,” Ms Naderi said.
She would be the first to concede, however, things are already bad enough for women in Afghanistan without a return to a government run by the Taliban.
Noorin TV in Kabul has been running a series suggesting the shelters, all operated by independent charities, are just fronts for prostitution. The series has offered no evidence, and the station has not sent anyone to visit the main shelters.
Another Performing Elephant Dies: End The Use Of Elephants At Southwick’s Zoo And Flea World
From IDA
Please click HERE to send automatic letter
Throughout her life, the elephant Dondi was forced to give performances, photos ops, and rides, spending her summers in a small and utterly inadequate display at the Southwick’s Zoo in Mendon, Massachusetts, and her winters at a flea market and amusement park called Flea World in Sanford, Florida. Last week, Dondi died unexpectedly from unknown causes, ending her sad and unnatural life.
IDA immediately filed a complaint with the USDA, urging an investigation into Dondi’s death, which raised a red flag because at age 36 she should have been in the prime of life. Elephants have a natural lifespan of 60-70 years.
We also sent a letter to Southwick’s Zoo President Justine Brewer, urging the zoo to publicly release Dondi’s veterinary records and autopsy reports, and to end the practice of displaying elephants, as its tiny exhibit fails to meet elephants’ complex needs.
The Southwick’s Zoo has a history of using elephants for performances and rides during the summer months, and apparently wasn’t too picky about its providers. Before Dondi, Southwick’s used an elephant named Judy, whose handler originally leased her from the notorious Hawthorn Corporation (one of the many elephants the company was forced to relinquish due to serious violations of the Animal Welfare Act). She died in 2007, and was found to have tuberculosis.
RELATED: Please visit HERE for additional information including letters to send and petitions to sign expressing your outrage at this senseless, mutilating, debilitating, and barbaric practice.
From Slog, The Stranger
By Dan Savage
While the whole world was debating the American Academy of Pediatrics’ position on “female genital cutting”—the AAP was against it before they were for it, and now, after an outcry, they’re against it again—Alice Dreger and Ellen Feder have been raising the alarm about “medical research” currently being conducted at Cornell University. A pediatric urologist at Cornell—Dix Poppas—has been operating on little girls with what he judges to be oversized clitorises, cutting away important clitoral tissues, and then stitching the glans to what remains of the shaft. Poppas claims that, unlike past clitoral-reduction procedures, his procedure is “nerve sparing.”
First big problem: “nerve-sparing” surgeries don’t always work. And the chunks of these girls’ clitorises that the doctor is cutting away—large pieces of their clitoral shafts—may be just as important as the clitoral glans. Dreger:
To shorten these clitorises, Poppas is saving the glans (tip) but cutting out parts of the shaft. Bo Laurent has pointed out that Masters and Johnsons showed that many women masturbate by rubbing the shafts of their clitorises. (Think about it: the clit is the homologue of the penis. How do men masturbate?) Many women seem to find their clitoral glans almost too sensitive. Poppas’s patients are losing the option of touching parts of their shafts, because he’s throwing them out (after the cut-away parts have been sent to pathology to see if he accidentally took out a nerve).
There’s lots to be outraged about here: there’s nothing wrong with these girls and their healthy, functional-if-larger-than-average clitorises; there’s no need to operate on these girls; and surgically altering a girl’s clitoris because it’s “too big” has been found to do lasting physical and psychological harm. But what’s most outrageous is how Poppas is “proving” that his surgery “spares nerves.”Dreger and Feder:
New Strategy for BLM: Madeleine’s Pony Express. One message, one address, one minute!
From Saving America’s Mustangs
Click HERE to send message
GET ON BOARD MADELEINE’S PONY EXPRESS: 20,000 LETTERS BY SEPT. 1
Dear Friends, Supporters, and Future Supporters,
We have heard you voice your complaints about the roundups.
We have listened to you share so many of your personal stories about your own adopted mustangs.
We have all sent thousands of letters via fax, email, and mail to our Government. Even calling phone lines that have since been unplugged, because of the high volume of calls from supporters.
We are doing all of these things daily, but there still has been NO change.
It’s time for the PONY EXPRESS!!!
I will personally hand deliver each and every letter that you write, via the Pony Express (one of our beautiful mustangs), to Washington DC. I am setting a goal of 20,000 individual letters to take with me. Americans, International supporters, animal activists, anyone who would like to tell President Obama, Secretary Salazar, and Bob Abbey that we aren’t going to sit by waiting until these roundups are over is encouraged to write. This is a very important issue to hundreds of thousands of people that have pleaded with our government to stop gathering our wild horses. This way they cannot unplug their phones, make their website impossible to send a comment to, or delete emails. These are GOING to get to Washington. I promise you that!
NASA Engineer Resigns to Protest Agency’s Monkey Radiation Experiments … Won’t you protest, too?
FROM PCRM
PLEASE TAKE ACTION:
Ask Administrator Bolden to Stop the Use of Monkeys in Space Radiation Studies
Click HERE
PLEASE NOTE:
If you are not a resident of the U.S., leave the postal code field blank in order to submit your message.
In today’s economy, it takes courage to walk away from a job. It takes conviction if it’s the job you dreamt of since childhood. Recently, April Evans left NASA when the agency refused to address her concerns—and those of a growing number of scientists—about its misguided plan to irradiate squirrel monkeys. Now, you can join Evans and ask NASA to stop the cruel experiments.
Evans was faced with the obvious concerns about animal research that has no applicability to human health when she learned of NASA’s plan in January. NASA’s proposal to expose monkeys to radiation to try to understand the effects of long-distance human spaceflight is a prime example of this futile and frustrating research.
Evans’ decision to quit NASA, where she was an engineer who worked on NASA’s International Space Station, has received extensive coverage, including a story in the Houston Chronicle.
Your help is needed. No parole for Juan Daniels.
From For the Love of the Dog Blog
By Deanna Raeke
Please send message using sample letter, modified, or your own requesting NO PAROLE for this sadist.
Please also sign a petition HERE
On January 30 2009, Juan Daniels was sentenced to 9 years in prison for the horrific cruelty he inflicted on his family’s dog, now known as Louis Vuitton. He was convicted of felony animal cruelty. It was the longest sentence ever given for animal cruelty in the history of Alabama. Juan Daniels chained, beat, and set his dog on fire because he wasn’t allowed to drive the family car. He is now up for parole. The Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles will consider his case on August 24 2010.
NO! This man should not be allowed parole. Eighteen months behind bars is way too short for someone who channeled a lifetime of anger and hate into horrific cruelty against the family pet. Come on, if he is going to have that sort of reaction to being denied use of the family car, what’s going to happen when something else pisses him off. He has a problem with authority – being told “NO” – and he shows it. Violently.
The Parole Board reads all letters sent to them concerning these cases. They become a permanent part of the inmates file.
This is a call for action. Please write the parole board and ask he remain behind bars. Be polite but firm. He is not ready to be paroled.
Vodpod videos no longer available.
From The Christian Science Monitor
A US district judge in San Francisco on Wednesday overturned California’s Proposition 8, the 2008 voter-approved ban on gay marriage.
The ruling, which will certainly be appealed, follows a closely watched trial on the constitutionality of the state’s prohibition of same-sex marriage that many expect will eventually be decided in the US Supreme Court. A decision there would result in a landmark ruling on one of the most contentious social issues of our time.
Lawyers who defended Proposition 8 have already filed a request with the court to keep the state’s gay marriage ban in place until an appeal can be heard.
The case challenging the proposition, Perry v. Schwarzenegger, was brought by two unmarried gay couples who argued the ban violated their right to due process under the law and the Constitution’s equal protection clause.
Chief US District Judge Vaughn Walker agreed.
“The evidence shows that Prop. 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California constitution, the notion that opposite sex couples are superior to same sex couples,” Judge Walker wrote in his 130-page decision. “Because California has no interest in discriminating against gay men and lesbians and because Prop. 8 prevents California from fulfilling its constitutional obligation to provide marriages on an equal basis, the court concludes the Prop. 8 is unconstitutional.”
Response on both sides has been swift and vocal.
“This is a game changer,” says Christopher Stoll, senior staff attorney for the National Center for Lesbian Rights. “The judge really got it right on every single point.”
“This decision affirms that in America, we don’t treat people differently because of their sexual orientation,” said Ramona Ripston, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, in a statement. “We rejoice at today’s decision but there’s a long road ahead toward establishing true marriage equality for same-sex couples.”
Lets all wish Our President Obama a very Happy Birthday, and Much Success and Happiness in the Days to come. Vegans and Vegetarians, please copy and paste the Sample Letter below, including the link, into the Birthday Card which Michelle Obama has set up to wish Her Husband and Our President a Very Happy Birthday.
SAMPLE LETTER (copy/paste everything between the two ***************** )
*****************
When we finally know we are dying, and all other sentient beings are dying with us, we start to have a burning, almost heartbreaking sense of the fragility and preciousness of each moment and each being, and from this can grow a deep,clear, limitless compassion for all beings.”
~ Sogyal Rinpoche
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, PRESIDENT OBAMA, FROM A VEGAN/VEGETARIAN CITIZEN of PLANET EARTH.
*****************
Please go to THIS Birthday Website to send the Official Vegan/Vegetarian Birthday Greeting.
http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/barackbirthday?source=FBS&share
Directive on Vivisection: the European Shame
To protest, please sign HERE
Please note that not everyone will be able to sign this …
At the beginning of September the European Parliament is due to vote and pass the new DIRECTIVE on the “protection” of animals used for “scientific purposes”
It is an industry-oriented law, made to specifically meet the necessities of the vivisection business. It doesn’t make alternative methods compulsory even when they exist. (Note: because they DO exist, and are truly more effective!)
It permits:
– To experiment on Primates even when NOT NECESSARY to find treatments for humans (art 5,8,55)
– To experiment on STRAY DOGS AND CATS (art 11)
– To sistematically RE-USE animals already tortured even if they suffered prolonged pain and distress (art 16)
– To carry out experiments WITHOUT anesthesia whenever the “researchers” deem it necessary (art 14)
– To experiment on live animals for “educational” purposes. (art 5)
And the list goes dramatically on…
As you can see there is noting scientific nor protective in this law.
Please sign:
http://www.leal.it/campagna-bruxelles/petizione-online/
From American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign
Pioneering approach seeks to re-establish family bands shattered in BLM roundup
Eight wild stallions captured this year in a Bureau of Land Management roundup in Nevada’s Calico Mountains have been rescued by Return to Freedom’s American Wild Horse Sanctuary near Lompoc, CA.
Return to Freedom placed the winning bids for the horses in an online BLM auction this week, said Neda DeMayo, founder and CEO.
“These elder stallions represent leadership and wisdom for the Calico herds,” said DeMayo. “These noble horses, once free on the range and now held captive, symbolize the tragedy of the federal wild horse program.”
Return to Freedom will try to reunite the stallions with their mares and restore, if possible, some of the family bands that were destroyed in the BLM helicopter stampede, she said.
“This rescue is a gesture of restitution for what has been taken from these horses and an affirmation of our commitment to fundamental change in the BLM wild horse program,” DeMayo said.
Between Dec. 28, 2009, and Feb. 4, BLM captured 1,922 horses from five Herd Management Areas (HMAs) in the Calico Mountains Complex in northwestern Nevada. More than 140 horses died as a result of the roundup and an additional 40 heavily pregnant mares spontaneously aborted, according to DeMayo.
To read the rest of this article, please click HERE
IDA Rescues Pit Bulls
From In Defense of Animals
Scotlund Haisley, IDA President
In Charleston Mississippi, I went with the director of our Hope Animal Sanctuary, Doll Stanley, to assist an Animal Control Officer (ACO) responding to a report of a dog who died in a small, filthy outdoor wire crate. Another dog was living in the same cage, and two others were on chains with only a small bowl of maggot-infested food. IDA helped seize the neglected dogs, who were taken into protective custody.
Then we headed straight to a second report of cruelty, at the residence of a suspected dogfighter in Charleston. Several critically emaciated dogs with scars, and some with fresh wounds, mostly pit bulls, were discovered chained. The dogs were on chains so tight they needed to be cut off their necks, and they were so starved and dehydrated they could barely stand.
The dogs were terrified while on chains, defending that tight worn 6 foot diameter circle. Once the chains were cut, they relaxed, curled up and accepted help, immediately forgiving the abuse they had suffered! All were confiscated. However the neglect was so extreme, that even with immediate veterinary care, including IV fluids, two of the dogs died overnight, and one, whom we named Mona Lisa, is clinging to life.
See Mona Lisa’s story:
Vodpod videos no longer available.
US Friends: Help End Agonizing Chemical Tests on Animals
From Care2/PETA
US friends, please sign and send automatic letter HERE
The Toxic Chemicals Safety Act, H.R. 5820, is designed to overhaul the 34-year-old Toxic Substances Control Act, which regulates how chemicals are tested and managed. This bill will require more chemical testing and will lead to vastly increased suffering on the part of beagles and all other animals in laboratories.
Toxicity testing of chemicals still relies heavily on the use of animals, yet even the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) now realizes that animal tests do not provide the most useful information for regulating chemicals. The EPA has largely adopted the approach outlined in the National Academy of Sciences report Toxicity Testing in the 21st Century: A Vision and a Strategy. The NAS report outlines a strategy for moving away from animal testing toward cell-based and molecular approaches. These new non-animal methods allow thousands of chemicals and mixtures to be tested in a short period of time—which is not possible to do using animals.
Zoonotic Diseases: The Next Global Plague?
By Mat Thomas
Opposing Views: Animal Rights
Originally Published 03/30/2010
An in-depth overview of an evolving human health threat
An overwhelming amount of nutritional research implicates the consumption of meat, dairy and eggs as a key cause of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and other serious illnesses. Industrialized factory farming is also one of the main drivers of environmental degradation, from pollution to global warming, pushing humanity’s very survival toward the brink of extinction. Yet there is another potentially deadly danger linked to the eating and production of animal products: zoonotic diseases that can be transmitted from domesticated farm animals to people.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, food borne illnesses are responsible for about 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths every year in the U.S. The CDC estimates that at least one-third of these illnesses and fatalities are directly attributable to the consumption of meat. However, this does not account for cases of food-borne illness caused by eating tainted dairy or eggs, the consumption of plant foods contaminated by bacteria originating from animals, or direct contact with infected animals.
The biological symmetries between humans and other animals enable some viruses to leap the species barrier when humans eat contaminated animal flesh, or by infecting farmers working in close proximity to livestock (who in turn become contagious and pass viruses to people with whom they come into contact). Some of these contagions are the result of complex evolutionary processes which make them so novel that the human immune system has not yet developed defenses against them. In other instances, bacteria growing inside the intestines of animals can afflict whoever ingests contaminated food with symptoms ranging from indigestion to fatal organ failure.
However they are transmitted, zoonotic diseases are clearly a grave threat to public health that some virologists say could potentially kill hundreds of millions of people worldwide should any of them grow into pandemics. Fortunately, there are many preventative measures we can take today to minimize the impact of this medical menace in years to come. With this in mind, below is an overview of the most common and emerging zoonotic diseases.
From NAVS
Please click HERE to send automatic letter now.
(Please remember that after you select “Next Step” on the initial page after entering or making any letter or address revisions, you need to select “Send Message” on the subsequent page, thank you.)
Urge the government to provide sanctuary instead of research:
Chimpanzees living at the Alamogordo Primate Facility (APF) on Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico are slated to go to any federal facility that wants to use them for research, according to the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), which oversees primate research.
The Air Force divested itself of its chimpanzee colony in 2000. Some of its chimpanzees were sent to research facilities, others to sanctuaries, but 200 remained when Charles River Laboratories took over the APF facility under a federal contract. The contract, which expires in 2011, includes a provision that Charles River not use the animals for invasive research. The federal government pays for their maintenance—or has up until this year.
This month the NCRR announced that it is planning to make these 200 chimpanzees available for invasive research when the contract expires in 2011.
According to Dr. Barbara Alving at the NCRR, “The animals must be moved to another facility to participate in research.” NCRR has already advertised the availability of these animals on their website, stating that they have authority to remove animals from the APF to other accredited chimpanzee facilities for research purposes.
There’s a reason they’re called butchers: meet The Prince of Flesh, Australian horse flesh purveyor
Images courtesy of Coalition for the Protection of Racehorses please find them HERE
WARNING, GRAPHIC: I have included additional photographs of this horror on another page due to the graphic nature of them, please do not click this link if you are sensitive to these types of images. If you still wish to see them, however, please click HERE
By Stephanie Dyer
Please send a letter, using a SAMPLE LETTER below, modifying, or writing your own, expressing your protest against horse meat for human consumption in Australia.
“We’ll be known as the horse whisperers,” he said, “You just whisper ‘Can I have a kilo of horse meat please’ …” Straight from the mouth of West Australian butcher “The Prince of Flesh”.
Horses have been part of Australia’s history and are almost a cultural icon. Our love and respect for horses runs deep, and it’s easy to see why. Their glorious stride and amazing grace truly captivates us all. Horses have the power to stir the soul and capture the imagination.
The horse is a creature of grace, power and beauty that has been prized throughout history for its intelligence, speed and strength. From their velvety muzzles to the tips of their flowing tails, horses have been loyal companions in peace and in war. They are truly beautiful creatures that capture our hearts.
Horse meat has NEVER been sold for domestic consumption in Australia – until now.
Our Compass 