Movement Watch

Thanks to our friends at Ánima for providing this document in Spanish on their web site.

Contents

• Chimp Haven’s Dangerous, Wild Argument
• The “Organic Meat” Saga Continues…But Not for Everyone
• Advocacy Group Pushes for More Efficient Killing at KFC
• Free-Range or Suburban Sprawl?
• Kill That Shark – But No Cruel Finning, Please
• New York’s Non-Callous Furs
• A Treacherous Home Stretch
• Environmentalists for Better Ammo
• California’s Humane Rodeos: Veterinarians Wanted

Chimp Haven’s Dangerous, Wild Argument

In August 2007, the Texas sanctuary Primarily Primates filed suit to nudge Chimp Haven into returning seven chimpanzees they’ve been holding on a temporary basis.

The sanctuary has gone ahead with construction for the chimpanzees’ permanent living areas as agreed under a contract with Ohio State University, which sent an endowment to Primarily Primates and intends for these apes to live at the Texas refuge for the rest of their lives. All seven formerly belonged to the university as laboratory subjects.

Chimp Haven answered the suit in September, saying the seven apes should be kept out of the Texas refuge because Texas law bans “dangerous wild animals” including nonhuman apes, as does Bexar County, where the refuge is. So because chimpanzees are “dangerous wild animals” they should stay in Louisiana and not in Texas.

That, by the way, is Chimp Haven’s entire argument.

Chimp Haven serves as a money-saving holding area for the National Institutes of Health. Under federal law, it must turn apes over for experiments if told to do so.^[1] And it must pull in donations -- from people whose tax money already supports the NIH.

But the people at Chimp Haven also promote themselves as a sanctuary. If they are trying to look serious about that, why pretend that a Texas law meant to keep dealers from buying and selling undomesticated animals in Texas was really meant to chase sanctuaries out of the state?

Primary Primates is countering Chimp Haven’s argument, and expects to see the apes back at their refuge quite soon.

The “Organic Meat” Saga Continues…But Not for Everyone

At Friends of Animals’ Foundations of a Movement conference, Matthew Kenny prepared such impressive raw vegan food that some of our conference attendees went to support the New York City restaurant Kenney co-founded, Pure Food and Wine. That restaurant, now run by Kenney’s ex-partner and co-founder Sarma Melngailis, still serves outstanding raw vegan fare in an airy, elegant setting.

The restaurant Kenney opened in Darien, Conn. -- Blue Green, reviewed in an earlier edition of this magazine -- recently shut its doors, and now Kenney has opened FreeFoods, a New York restaurant that involves animal slaughter. Kenney’s about-face involves grass-fed beef (the term clearly conveying the idea that companies feed beef, not cows), wild Alaskan fish, and the flesh of “organic, free-range” chickens. Summer items on the catering menu included Maine lobster and duck meat.

Groceries and other vendors of purportedly humane animal products now commonly turn up, often as high-profile sponsors, at vegetarian fairs. T he Boston Vegetarian Food Fair and the three-day Toronto Vegetarian Food Fair were sponsored by organic meat seller Whole Foods Market -- giving that corporation still more advertising from the vegetarian community. N ewcomers to these events may well get the impression that they can save animals and eat them too. The London Vegan F estival does not permit vendors or exhibitors who use or sell animal flesh. This is a matter of line-drawing, which is always subject to debate; at the London event, it’s had the positive effect of averting promotions for the “humane” animal trade while pulling vegetarianism to its logical conclusion (holding up complete independence from animal products as the ideal).

Former dairy farmer Harold Brown notes that many at the Canadian Institute for Animal Welfare in Toronto are excited about the trend in marketing purportedly sustainable or humane animal flesh. Yet Brown talked at length with a farmer who just last year believed animal-based fertilizers are needed in sustainable farming, but who agreed, at Brown’s urging, to try vegan-organic agriculture on a patch of land. After seeing the veganic patch double its expected yield, the farmer has converted.

Advocacy Group Pushes for More Efficient Killing at KFC

After infiltrating businesses with contracts with the KFC restaurant chain, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) protested that chicken slaughter is “faulty and inefficient.” So the group is calling on KFC to immediately adopt PETA's recommended “animal welfare guidelines” internationally.

These slaughtering instructions have been approved by members of KFC's animal welfare advisory panel, says PETA, and “represent the most up-to-date studies and research into animal welfare.”^[2] Some readers will say we shouldn’t be too critical when advocates are doing something. But we are, after all, advocates for the animals, not for our own comfort zones. If birds and other animals could hold their advocates accountable, wouldn’t this language and activism look different? Let us begin with dropping the term “animal welfare” where it doesn’t apply. KFC is a corporation that profits from the killing, frying, and vending of as many chickens as possible. It cannot rightly claim to have an “animal welfare advisory panel”; and advocates who work with such a panel are pressing for husbandry adjustments -- not the welfare (which, according to any common-sense definition, means well-being) of birds.

In related news, animal exploitation has been termed “protection” as the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA)^[3] has entered into a partnership with FAI Farms Ltd., a commercial farming and research enterprise, to create a “Model Farm Project” to “demonstrate high animal welfare and food quality while delivering a sustainable financial benefit to the farmer.”^[4] By 2008, its Brazil site will breed “free-range broilers, layers, beef cattle, sheep, pigs and sugar cane” while its Beijing branch raises “free range broilers, layers, pigs and sheep.”

The partnership's goals? Establishment of an international community to promote the practical benefits of animal farming to all those who are involved, via a website, leaflets, seminars, training and conferences. “ We hope that the results of these very exciting projects will guide farmers, retailers and governments around the world to plan food production for the future,” says project director Mike Gooding.

To fathom how profoundly irresponsible it is to push animal agribusiness in China, consider that just 20 years ago, the average person in China derived only 6% of their caloric intake from animal fats; today the figure is a whopping 25%.^[5] And China is now the third largest dairy producer in the world. ^[6]

Free-Range or Suburban Sprawl?

The Union of B.C. Municipalities recently met in Vancouver, and discussed a resolution, supported by the Vancouver Humane Society, that calls for British Columbia’s residents to eat only cage-free eggs.

A switch from cages to free-range operations would require an additional 4,000 acres in the town Abbotsford alone, said its mayor, George Ferguson, who opposed the measure.^[7] And this raises a very good question: Should free-living animals have even more of their dwindling habitat destroyed and taken-over in order to accommodate egg corporations?

According to British Columbia Egg Marketing Board Chair David Taylor, there has been a switch in trends in recent years. Twelve percent of egg sales involve chickens not kept in traditional cages, a substantial rise over just a few years ago. "Clearly, B.C. egg farmers respond to market demand and provide a wide choice of eggs," Taylor said. And if this is so, the market would also change as more and more people decline to use eggs. Friends of Animals activists in British Columbia have continued to share egg-free recipes through The Victoria Vegan. When people enjoy cooking without eggs because of their work, activists have made a fundamental difference for animals, by not treating them as our possessions. There is no need, then, to argue that egg production sector should develop acre after acre of the planet’s finite land.

Kill That Shark – But No Cruel Finning, Please

Annually, tens of millions of sharks have their fins removed for soup and are then thrown back into the water to die. The Humane Society of the United States is promoting a U.S. proposal to “save sharks from cruel finning” -- that is, to require companies to land Atlantic sharks with their fins attached. In October, the group promoted a proposal by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to amend the Highly Migratory Species Fishery Management Plan accordingly.

Spot a word such as “cruel” or “barbaric” in an alert, and usually you’ll find something targeted for regulation while the underlying problem is given a pass. For another example, recall that advocates told us celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck no longer serves “cruel veal.” This doesn’t mean Puck stopped selling veal. Puck still sells the bodies of dairy cows’ young -- as long as the calves were kept in the approved kind of confinement, which is slightly bigger than the “cruel” form. It’s unlikely the calves, torn from their mothers soon after birth and soon hauled off to meet their grim fate at a slaughter plant, would think much of that distinction.

New York’s Non-Callous Furs

In August 2007, campaigners sent out a release titled “ New York First State to Ban Electrocution of Animals for Fur.” One campaigner praised state lawmakers for “their foresighted leadership in protecting animals from this horrifying fur factory farm practice" as Senator Frank Padavan described the law as “outlawing the barbaric, callous and inhumane practice of electrocuting animals for use of their fur" and “another significant step forward in the fight to ensure all animals are treated with the highest standard of humane treatment and care."

"This painful method of killing fur bearing animals is inhumane and gruesome," added Assemblymember Deborah Glick. "Most people would be appalled at these methods that are considered unacceptable according to guidelines by the American Veterinary Medical Association. It is reassuring that this inhumane practice will be prohibited in at least one state."

Translation: The killing of animals for fur will continue in New York, but with more detailed regulations, and according to standards compatible with those of the industry representatives themselves. Fur Commission USA, for example, doesn’t approve electrocution; it states that "the only method of euthanasia approved by Fur Commission USA is bottled gas, either pure carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide."

Worldwide, tens of millions of animals, including mink, foxes, chinchillas and rabbits are killed annually for the fur industry. This will not end because lawmakers and advocates believe “most people would be appalled” that death is imposed by a particular method. It will only end when most people are appalled by the thought of wearing of animal skins, and that needless killing itself is inhumane.

A Treacherous Home Stretch

In September, a federal court of appeals upheld a law in the state of Illinois barring the slaughter of horses for human consumption. The ruling is still open to review by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals or by the U.S. Supreme Court -- which declined to address the matter when it came up in Texas.

Illinois, according to a representative of the Animal Welfare Institute, “did not want to be home to the nation's last remaining horse slaughter plant, and today's court ruling signals an end to this gruesome industry in the United States."^[8]

Horses are now being transported over the Texas-Mexico border for slaughter. On 30 September 2007, a San Antonio paper carried a report called “Horse Slaughter on the Border” and, as one writer put it, “a horrendous photograph of something that I'd guess most of us never have seen, nor want to see.” Jerry Lara's photos of horses being stabbed repeatedly and then strung up to bleed to death, wrote the commentator, “dramatizes the usually untold story of what happens to Black Beauty when she gets old or can't run.”^[9]

And that raises a fundamental but rarely discussed issue: These horses could be just about anyone’s, for owners do not commonly keep horses all the way to the animals’ natural deaths.

Now, animal advocates are pushing t he American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act, a federal bill to ban horse slaughter in the United States and transport for killing abroad. According to industry parties opposing the Act, it would shut off “ the only USDA-inspected source of equine protein, an essential element in the diet of U.S. zoo animals.”^[10] They add that slaughter plants kill equids before processing, and the method “meets specific humane requirements set forth by … the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) Statement on Euthanasia, because it results in instantaneous brain death.”

And now, some owners might try to slaughter horses themselves (as rendering plants must, by law, collect only dead horses) or abandon horses to avoid the cost of rendering. This too is something most of us never have seen, nor want to see. But a s long as Black Beauty is bought, traded, and broken, killing will continue, and it will happen on the owner’s terms. The real question is not whether a new law will pass. It’s whether we should treat horses as items of merchandise in the first place.

Environmentalists for Better Ammo

Following a lawsuit by the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) and a coalition including hunters, California passed the Ridley-Tree Condor Preservation Act, which requires non-lead ammunition for killing coyotes and other large animals within the endangered California condor range, beginning in July 2008.

Studies show that lead in carcasses and gut piles left by hunters can poison the birds.

California condors should be respected for their inherent value, but then again, so should all animals. A key reason so many are endangered today is because they have not had such respect. And unfortunately, as plaintiffs in the lawsuit, hunters had an opportunity to carry out public relations work for their interest in continuing to kill animals.

“The safety of our families and healthy wildlife are important to hunters across California,” said plaintiff Anthony Prieto. “There’s a simple solution that lets hunters hunt while protecting condors, eagles and other wildlife; it’s lead-free ammo. I know from experience that these bullets are safe and ballistically outperform bullets made from lead.”

Of course it’s good to remove lead from the environment. How disturbing, though, that CBD sounds so much like the hunter-plaintiff: “ Safe, reliable non-lead bullets and shot made from copper and other materials are widely available for big-game hunting and perform as well or better than lead ammunition.”^[11]

The new law will even provide hunters non-lead ammunition at discount prices.

California’s Humane Rodeos: Veterinarians Wanted

California will now include charreadas in the law that requires a veterinarian be on call to see animals injured in rodeos. The advocate sponsoring the bill, representing the group Action for Animals, stated that the law, which would include the Mexican-style rodeos in the law’s definition of rodeo, is “a matter of fairness. Nothing is being banned.”

Of course, education to advance the end of rodeo as a social custom would genuinely be “a matter of fairness” and won’t rely on the definition of rodeo, but rather on the broader idea that other animals weren’t put on the planet, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, to get our kicks for us.

And on that subject, in the same month, Governor Schwarzenegger removed California’s 37-year ban o n the import and sale soccer shoes made from kangaroo leather. Yet another reminder that legislation cannot establish fundamental rights, simply for the reason that laws can be repealed. As a social awareness is raised about the inherent value of other animals, people will decline to wear kangaroos, chinchillas, or cows. A deep sense of respect, once embraced, can never be repealed.

Footnotes