Advocacy For Animals

by Marla Rose

For some of us, green thumbs are just not a given. We can talk to our little seedlings, touch them with tenderness, give them just the right amount of water and space but it’s still as though we are playing by someone else’s rulebook, one that was written in a foreign language. Are the plants getting too much sunlight? Not enough? Why do I have little holes on my lettuce leaves? What does that mean? Is it still safe to eat? Did I just see an aphid?

There are seemingly innumerable factors poised at the ready to destroy our innocent plants and it is indeed a steep learning curve. For those of us who don’t necessarily have a natural grasp of gardening, it is cause for a real celebration when we can coax an actual chubby tomato out of a seed. It’s like a tiny but still amazing everyday miracle. When we leave this tomato to ripen on the vine, though, and wake the next day to find it discarded in the dirt with a a single lazy bite taken out of it, how can we not be disappointed? We flip through our our seed catalogues in February with big, glossy aspirations of overflowing baskets filled with colorful, perfect produce. When our bell peppers have bite marks from another creature’s teeth, it’s frustrating.

Between squirrels, rabbits, and assorted other critters that jump, burrow, claw, and chew their way through our potentially burgeoning gardens, it’s a wonder that anything can get grown to begin with.

How can animal lovers keep our produce protected in cruelty-free, non-toxic but effective ways from these smart and tenacious garden invaders?

Gardeners from Gentle World, a pioneering animal advocacy and peace organization with centers in Hawai’i and New Zealand, recommend advance planning and preparation in order to minimize damage created by unintended guests.

“Keeping animals out of your garden is about proper planning and making your veggie patch less attractive to the animals who might discover it. Slightly altering your garden’s design can provide a nonviolent way to end unexpected visits to your veggie patch.” continue reading…

by Will Travers

— Our thanks to Born Free USA for permission to republish this post, which originally appeared on the Born Free USA Blog on July 2, 2013. Travers is Chief Executive Officer of Born Free USA.

What’s worse than the alarming escalation of the global illegal wildlife trade is its ever-expanding link to organized crime and terrorist organizations. Add to that the potential spread of infectious diseases and the precipitous decline of vulnerable wildlife populations, especially in developing countries, and it’s clear that the new Executive Order from the White House may have come just in time.

The Obama Administration has condemned wildlife poaching and trafficking of animals and animal parts, and has established an Advisory Council, a Presidential Task Force on Wildlife Trafficking, and a review of the previous National Strategy for Combating Wildlife Trafficking. And there is a much-needed injection of funds in the form of “regional and bilateral training and technical assistance” to African nations.

Animals worldwide are devastated by poaching and commercial trade: elephants (for their ivory), rhinos, tigers and bears (for their body parts), and reptiles, primates, and exotic birds (captured and sold to zoos and into the pet trade around the world). The animal trade is a multi-billion dollar industry second only to the drug trade in global profitability (surpassing human and gun trafficking). Elephant populations, such as in Tanzania and Burkina Faso, are being devastated by poachers; this warrants serious and effective international intervention.

The president’s order is an appropriate and timely response to the crisis of international wildlife crime and trafficking. However, its merit will soon be tested. The order will prove hollow should funds not be appropriately distributed and monitored, should measurable actions not be taken by both the Task Force on Wildlife Trafficking and its corresponding Advisory Council.

Born Free is working in Africa and around the world to protect wild, imperiled species. It is encouraging to have President Obama and the highest levels of the United States government recognize and prioritize this threat to biodiversity, local economies, and human health. Let’s continue this tough stance on a particularly brutal and unnecessary illegal trade.

by Jennifer Molidor

— Our thanks to the ALDF Blog, where this post was originally published on July 2, 2013. Molidor is ALDF’s Staff Writer.

Having been an animal lover all my life, studying biological anthropology in college, and spending as much of my time in the wilderness as possible, I was a keen witness to the emotional sentience and intelligence of animals. But I discovered I had no idea the depravity and cruelty humans perpetrate upon human and nonhuman animals. It was learning about bear-bile farms that really broke me.

A post written by Mark Bekoff, titled “Bear Kills Son and Herself on a Chinese Bear Farm” pierced my heart to its core. A mother bear trapped at a bile farm could hear her baby suffering the extraction of his bile. Unable to stand his pain, or even the idea of it, she broke through the grates, smothered him, and intentionally rammed her own head into a wall until she died.

For the past month, the Animal Book Club has been featuring Barbara J. King’s excellent new book “How Animals Grieve.” In Chapter 11 (“Animal Suicide?”), Barbara considers the horrors of bile farms. She quotes Else Poulsen’s Smiling Bears, to explain:

Each bear lies down, permanently, in a coffin-shaped, wire mesh crate for his entire life—years—able to move only one arm so that he can reach out for food… Without proper anesthetic, drugged only half unconscious, the bear is tied down by ropes, and a metal catheter, which eventually rusts, is permanently stuck through his abdomen into his gall bladder.

Unable to move, bears often lose their minds, smack their heads on the bars, and suffer long, excruciating, unimaginable pain before death, which must come far, far too slowly. Possibly 10,000 or more bears are suffering at bile farms across Asia, where bile is extracted for supposed medicinal purposes, and used in face cream and toothpaste.

Barbara’s book considers instances like these, and our interpretation of the mother bear’s actions.

Do animals kill themselves? And if they do, is grief ever the probable motivation?

She avoids the easy conclusions of anthropomorphizing animals as well as negating the emotional complexity of animals. Elephants who experience post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a striking example–where the horrors of poaching and war disrupt the normal patterns of elephant behavior. Jane Goodall showed us baby chimpanzees who lose their mothers can die of broken hearts. I have always been similarly struck by silverback male gorillas—vegetarian males who are the great protectors of those they love. The stories that haunt me are those in which poachers, who hunt gorillas merely to butcher the silverback’s hands and teeth, shoot silverbacks again and again–because only death will stop a male gorilla from protecting his family. He keeps charging in defense until his life is taken. Humans do terrible things to each other–is it really so difficult to understand that animals suffer as we do for love?

Are we the only animals who love? Who suffer? Who would break through walls to protect our children? Who experience confinement and pain as an unbearable torture not preferable to death? What can we learn about the psychological damage we do animals in even well-intentioned zoos, by understanding, through compassion and empathy, the real lives of love, grief, and suffering present in animals?

As Barbara writes, “We bring about conditions in the wild and captivity that lead animals to feel a sort of self-grief, and at times to feel empathy for others’ suffering. Whatever caused that mother bear on the Chinese bile farm to run into a wall, in the end, it was human behavior—human greed twinned with an insensitivity to animal suffering—that murdered her.” How much are we contributing to animal suffering, if not bears on bile farms, maybe animals closer to home? From factory farms, to zoos, to theme parks, to animal testing, to rodeos, just what are we doing to animals who share the ability to love and to grieve?

Each week, the National Anti-Vivisection Society (NAVS) sends out an e-mail alert called Take Action Thursday (presented on Wednesday this week because of the U.S. Independence Day holiday tomorrow). These tell subscribers about current actions they can take to help animals. NAVS is a national, not-for-profit educational organization incorporated in the State of Illinois. NAVS promotes greater compassion, respect, and justice for animals through educational programs based on respected ethical and scientific theory and supported by extensive documentation of the cruelty and waste of vivisection. You can register to receive these action alerts and more at the NAVS Web site.

This week’s Take Action Thursday Wednesday asks for your immediate action on federal legislation to prevent the reopening of slaughterhouses for horses, proposed federal rulemaking that would preempt state laws prohibiting shark finning, and the veto of a New Jersey bill to end the use of gestation crates for pigs. This issue also addresses a growing effort to end the transportation of shark fins on cargo planes and an upcoming international court ruling on Japan’s whale hunts.

Federal Legislation

Urgent action is needed on the Safeguard American Food Exports Act of 2013, S 541 and HR 1094, which would prohibit the sale or transport of equines and equine parts in interstate or foreign commerce for human consumption. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has agreed to issue a permit to Valley Meat Company to operate a horse slaughter plant in Roswell, New Mexico. The company successfully sued the USDA, charging that it unlawfully failed to reestablish its equine inspection service after an appropriations rider that prevented the agency from spending money on these inspections was lifted in 2011. The USDA is poised to approve two additional horse slaughter plants, one in Missouri and one in Iowa. continue reading…

by Gregory McNamee

Wild horses are the often forgotten stepchild of the European colonization of what is now the American West, originally the descendants of horses that escaped from stockades and corrals in the heyday of New Spain, the numbers of their descendants augmented by the arrival of the occasional new maverick.
They are magnificent in appearance, highly desired by some breeders—but also despised by many livestock producers in the American West, who form a powerful lobby, and who have been successful in pressuring various agencies of the Department of Interior to remove, kill, or otherwise control wild horses across a vast range that encompasses parts of ten states.

A new report from the National Academy of Sciences is sharply critical of those agencies’ management of wild horses, suggesting that not only are the true numbers underreported by 10 to 15 percent but also that the present practices of removing horses from the land, often with the use of helicopters and guns, simply increases the available forage for the ones who are left, and therefore their herd size. Controversially, the report also encourages the agencies to use “scientific” methods on wild horses and burros, particularly by employing fertility-control drugs to reduce the numbers of animals.

Such scientific recourses too often lead to unintended consequences that are inconvenient for humans and fatal to animals. Granted that the Western ranges are too heavily populated by wild horses, they are also dramatically overpopulated by privately owned cattle and sheep foraging on what is quite literally the public domain at prices far below those imposed on the same animals on private lands. A healthy management policy would remove several cows and sheep for every horse, but healthy policies are hard to come by. Still, as the American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign notes, the NAS recommendations are a helpful start. continue reading…