For those of us who are free, freedom often goes unsung. But for certain mice and rats rescued from a laboratory, that instant of emerging into fresh air and sunshine for the first time ever is a miracle, a moment of true wonder.
And on one such occasion last August, “the perfect day to experience how beautiful this world can be“, Italian vegan and ardent animal-lover Rachele Totaro was there with her camera to capture every emotion.
Maybe like me you believed that ‘only’ those millions of poor animals used in lethal tests die at the hands of workers in labs. Not so. Many millions more used in non-lethal experiments as well as those simply surplus, kept ‘in reserve’ in case they might be needed, are routinely killed. An institution that values these lives only as units for the practice of research is hardly going to care for them once they no longer serve the purpose.
But in Italy at least, the law permits those who do value the lives of these little beings to save them from that fate. And near Milan, a wonderful shelter called La Collina dei Conigli is rescuing all the rats, mice and rabbits they can from laboratories, and searching for them safe, happy forever homes.
Rachele speaks of her gratitude, as the mice and rats were released from their imprisonment and suffering on that particular hot August day, “to have witnessed such a great moment of rebirth!”
Big foot
So… is this above the famous “sky”?
Grateful
Little Bros
Who are you?
Contemplating
Loving cuddles
Hold me
Curious guy
Exploring
Safe now
I’ll protect you…
Enjoying the moment
I love you!
Tell me the story of how you rescued me, again…
So many things to see
“Shy ones, little warriors, curious explorers, cuddle-lovers: every one acted in a different way when taken outdoors, and they showed once again that they are not mere numbers, as they are considered in labs, but individuals with peculiar attitudes and personalities.”
Sharing as they do 97.5% of DNAwith us, why should we be surprised if we find ourselves instinctively reading in their body language and little faces the same emotions we experience ourselves.
And if Rachele’s gentle photos make you cry, know that you are not alone!
#PersonsNotProperty #AdoptDontShop
To see more of Rachele’s pics of nonhuman persons, click here
On the morning of August 17, nearly 12,000 animal rights activists arrived at the Achilles Statue for the Official Animal Rights March of London.
Chants bellowed through the streets of London as activists took over Trafalgar Square early Saturday morning. The atmosphere was electric, according to Animal Rebellion co-founder Dan Kimble, whose newly formed volunteer network will carry momentum from the march into a series of similar nonviolent demonstrations for two weeks this October. He is determined to create a world where compassion towards all non-human animals is the norm, and so are we.
The event was organized by Surge, a grassroots animal rights organization “determined to create a world where compassion towards all non-human animals is the norm.” Surge is coordinating more than 40 other Official Animal Rights Marches around the globe. Present at the March were speakers such as Earthling Ed, Mythical Mia, and Nelufar Hedayat, to name a few. Chants bellowed through the streets and through the entire London community as activists took over the square.
This year, Surge welcomed Animal Rebellion, the newly-formed mass volunteer movement, to the Official Animal Rights March of London. The purpose of this alliance is to provide an introduction to the two-week nonviolent demonstrations led by Animal Rebellion beginning on October 7.
“The atmosphere was electric today as we officially launched Animal Rebellion,” Dan Kimble, co-founder of Animal Rebellion, told Sentient Media. “I’m really, really excited about what this momentum will bring.”
This Rebellion will take place at the Smithfield Meat Market in London, mobilizing 10,000 animal advocates for two weeks with demands for the government to cease animal oppression and shift to a plant-based food system.
Please take this unique opportunity to contribute to the UK’s new 75 year National Food Strategy – consultation here. If you’d like some guidance, visit Grow Green
“If you eat meat, you probably buy products made by one Brazilian company. A company with such influence it can impact climate change, openly admit to having bribed more than 1,000 politicians, and continue to grow despite scandal after scandal. And you’ve probably never heard of it.
“Welcome to a world where meat is the new hot commodity, controlled by just a handful of gigantic firms which together wield unprecedented control over global food production. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has been investigating the biggest of all: JBS, a Brazilian company which slaughters a staggering 13 million animals every single day and has annual revenue of $50bn.”
A cloud of scandals hangs over JBS and its shadowy network of subsidiaries, yet the company continues to expand. In the last decade it became the world’s biggest producer and exporter of meat with facilities in Australia and across the Americas, swallowing up among others the big US company Pilgrim’s Pride and Northern Ireland’s poultry firm Moy Park. Since the takeover, JBS’s investment in its Moy Park arm of the business enabled construction of hundreds more chicken farms in the UK which now supply nearly a third of all chicken eaten here in Britain.
JBS in numbers
13.6 million poultry birds slaughtered per day
116,000 pigs slaughtered per day
77,000 cattle slaughtered per day
$50 billion – amount of annual revenues
900,000 – number of employees across the world
150 – number of countries it supplies with meat
$250 million – amount company paid out in bribes in 2017
1,829 – number of candidates across Brazil’s political spectrum the company admits to having bribed
$3.2 billion – amount JBS was fined for bribery, one of the biggest fines in global corporate history
Scandal after JBS scandal. Take your pick –
Wholesale bribery and corruption – among many other scandals over the years, revelations from a 2014 investigation actually toppled the Brazilian government. Right now the company is under investigation for colluding with politicians and public servants to divert resources from a government-owned bank
Dirty meat – rotting beef, falsified export documents, failure to inspect meat plants, chickens contaminated with salmonella (a million of them in the UK)
Slave labour – workers forced to live in degrading conditions without adequate shelter, toilets or clean water
Animal cruelty – chickens punched and beaten with iron rods, piglets beaten and their testicles ripped off without anaesthetic
Illegal Amazonian deforestation – fined $7.7 million in 2017
Being part of a price-fixing cartel – now driving down prices paid to farmers for their meat, and now driving up their own wholesale prices by colluding with other major poultry producers to reduce the supply of chicken
And don’t imagine it couldn’t happen here in the UK. The Moy Park arm of JBS doesn’t bear close scrutiny either.
Moy Park UK in numbers
More than £1 million – total of fines paid since 2015 for subjecting chickens to “unnecessary pain and distress”, failure to pay workers the minimum wage, and unsafe work practices
8 million in 2 years – number of birds that never reach the market, wasted, thrown away as diseased, emaciated, injured with fractures and dislocations, dead before reaching the slaughterhouse, or contaminated
6 million – number of birds slaughtered per week
£1.6 billion – company turnover in 2017
In June this year three Moy Park farms in Lincolnshire were secretly filmed uncovering “horrifying conditions”, chickens lame, struggling to breath and surrounded by dead birds. Moy Park supplies most major UK supermarkets, as well as McDonald’s and KFC.
It took a team of seven dedicated investigative journalists to lift the lid on the unsavoury modus operandi of the JBS matrix. They deserve our thanks for all the hard (and possibly dangerous) work they put into producing this exposé of meat production’s dark and dirty underbelly. Do take a few minutes to read it in full.
They conclude:
“JBS began as a local butcher’s shop; now its beef travels thousands of miles from Brazil toUK supermarkets. That journey clouds the link between farm and plate and makes it almost impossible for the average consumer to understand where their food comes from — and how big a price the planet is paying the price for their cheap meat.”
Let’s not allow their hard work to be in vain. The only way we can be certain we’re not funding the shady JBS brothers’ luxury yachts and lamborghinis, lavish parties and sumptuous mansions – and much much more importantly that we’re not complicit in deforestation, animal cruelty, human rights abuse, wholesale corruption, and the supply of contaminated products – is to take the meat off our plates. The cause of justice, the animals and the planet will thank us.
JBS: Brazilian butchers take over the world A special investigation from Andrew Wasley, Alexandra Heal and Lucy Michaels in London, Dominic Phillips, André Campos and Diego Junqueira in Sao Paulo and Claire Smyth in Belfast
If you visit the Port of Rotterdam you will now be able to see a world first of its kind – a floating dairy farm. Riding one wave ahead of the right-on-trend urban farming movement, property company Beladon have created a “cow garden”, a three-level futuristic vision of glass, steel and concrete. And its first residents have just arrived on board.
But a farm floating on water? Why have such a thing? Minke and Peter van Wingerden, husband and wife business partners happened to be in New York in 2012, and witnessed firsthand the difficulties bringng fresh food into the city in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.. A floating farm, they decided, could produce food close to point of consumption, while at the same time neatly resolving the challenge posed by the scarcity of land within cities.
Beladon proudly call it “Transfarmation” and the company website sets out their priorities:-
Animal welfare
Circularity
Sustainability
Innovation
Producing healthy food in cities, close to the consumer
Sustainability and circularity
Putting to one side the question of animal welfare and healthy food for a moment, in terms of sustainability, the floating farm is indeed a thing of beauty. At least on the surface. The cows are fed with grass from local football fields, potato peel waste from the french fry industry, and chaff (bran) sifted from the flour in local windmills. This fodder which would otherwise go to waste is collected and delivered to the farm by electric cars. Water purified from the cow’s urine, will be used to grow red clover, alfalfa and grass under artificial light. A robot tops up the cows’ food stations and another scoops up the dry dung. The dung will be used on site, or sent to a nearby farm. On the floor below, the 1,000 litres of milk the cows produce daily will be processed into yogurt which will reach Rotterdam’s supermarket shelves with negligible transport costs, either financial or environmental. All good so far.
Cow poop
But with their neat cow poo disposal plan, Beladon seems not to have noticed the massive mountain of the stuff under which the Netherlands is already practically sinking. “The nation’s 1.8 million cows are producing so much manure that there isn’t enough space to get rid of it safely. As a result, farmers are dumping cow poo illegally, the country is breaking EU regulations on phosphates designed to prevent groundwater contamination, and the high levels of ammonia emissions are affecting air quality.” The Guardian
Any excess dung from the floating facility will just add to the pile. What Dutch farm near or far is going to want it?
The WWF is not a fan of all the cow poop either. It’s doing so much damage to the Dutch environment, last year the charity called for a 40% reduction of dairy herds. The Netherlands has the lowest level of biodiversity in Europe after Malta. The Guardian. Fewer dairy farms are needed, not more, floating or otherwise.
We’re not told if Beladon has a plan for what comes out the dairy cow’s other end. Cow burps are an even bigger emitter of methane than the poop. Emissions from either end of dairy cows across the planet together make up 4% of the world’s GHGs.
Milk, a healthy food?
It’s certainly promoted that way. But PETA gives the white stuff a big thumbs down. Check out their list of 12 reasonswhy they think cow’s milk is bad for you.
The NHS takes a different view. Its website says, “Milk and dairy products, such as cheese and yoghurt, are great sources of protein and calcium. They can form part of a healthy, balanced diet.” But adds, “Unsweetened calcium-fortified dairy alternatives like soya milks, soya yoghurts and soya cheeses also count as part of this food group and can make good alternatives to dairy products.”
Good or bad, is it essential for human health? The Conversationexamines the science, and concludes, “Milk and dairy foods are convenient and good value and provide lots of essential nutrients which are trickier to source from other foods.” But that “when it comes to health, the bottom line is we probably don’t need dairy in our diets.”
The Harvard Medical School blog agrees: “Keep in mind that eating a well-balanced diet that includes plenty of green leafy vegetables and nuts can better help you get the calcium and protein you need rather than relying too much on dairy.”
So if we don’t need it, why have it? There are plenty of good reasonsto shun dairy apart from health.
Meanwhile, PETA’s simple slogan remains true
Nature intended mums’ milk for human babies, and a cow’s milk for hers, not for humans, young, old or in between.
Does Europe need more milk anyway?
In 2018, European Commissioner Phil Hogan warned of oversupply in the European milk market. He said that supplies of milk had “unsustainably increased” in certain EU countries and singled out the Netherlands and Poland as the main culprits. Europe already has 350,000 tonnes of skimmed milk powder in storage – “the EU’s method to remove excess milk supplies from the market and help keep a floor on milk prices.”
The answer to our question then is an emphatic “No”. Europe needs less milk, not more. So why would Beladon enter a market already saturated? Is it too cynical to see the floating farm as something of a gimmick, and the cows as unwilling players in an – admittedly spectacular – publicity stunt?
Animal welfare
Beladon’s floating milk factory (let’s call a spade a spade here) is anchored near “the heavily industrialised mouth of the New Meuse River”, hardly a cow’s natural environment. But then you’re never going to get that in the heart of a big city.
While just about all cow- and milk-related activities take place on the floating facility, the cows can, if the whim takes them, “potter over a ramp to real-life pasture on the land.” It sounds delightful until you remember that heavily-industrialised river mouth. If I did drink milk, I doubt I’d want to be drinking that milk. And what exactly the logistics are of this pleasant little amble landward is unclear. Cows are herd animals. One can only imagine the chaos created by 30 + cows trying to negotiate a ramp to reach “real-life pasture”, or “pottering” back in the other direction. It sounds suspiciously like a bit of welfarist window-dressing, doesn’t it?
If you’re worried about the cows getting seasick, don’t be. The water-borne building is apparently as stable as a cruise liner. Besides, the Floating Farm website assures us, “millions of heads of commercial cattle spend weeks at sea each year while being shipped around the globe without issue.”Without issue? Really? Read what Animals Australia has to say about that here, and if you can stomach it, click through their gallery of photos.
Of course the cows in residence on the floating farm will not be subjected to those kind of conditions, we would hope. But if Beladon, which is first and foremost a property company, can confidently publish such a fallacious statement, it surely puts a huge question mark over their ideas on what makes for good animal welfare.
The Floating Farm may well be the Ritz Hotel for cows, but still…
This new cow palace in Rotterdam is a very far cry from the traditional picture of your typical dairy farm, that oft reproduced picture of cows munching contentedly in flower-strewn meadows before a rustic barn. But that traditional picture – the one the dairy industry has always projected and does all it can to keep us believing – is even further from the unsavoury reality of the dairy cow’s life than it is from the cow palace. Take a minute to check out the truth hidden behind the cosy illusion.
Just like all other mammals including us, a cow will only produce milk when she has given birth. If you can bear it, look what happens when her babe is born. Whatever else it is, dairy farming can never be humane.
So, do we need Rotterdam’s new floating farm?
Innovation, glass, steel, alfalfa, robots, “real-life pasture”, closed-loop systems or not, sorry Beladon, we do not need your floating farm. For so many reasons, it’s time for humans to wean themselves off dairy, and end the cruel practice of stealing babies from their mums.
How did we get here?
Right next to Beladon’s floating farm, bobs on the water a park made from recycled plastic garbage. How apt that these two facilities float there side by side, together creating a perfect symbol of the madness the human race has led itself into. Of how very far we have allowed a misguided sense of our own ‘superior’ faculties, a mechanistic world view, and blind pursuit of technological advance to distance us from our true place in the natural world – and other animals too.
Beladon’s next exciting venture? A floating farm for egg-laying chickens. The hen, one of the most abused animals on the planet.
“It’s a big victory for animal welfare in Norway. It’s a realisation that the consideration for animals can actually weigh heavier than just money and business interests.”
Siri Martinsen, head of Noah, animal rights organisation.
Later this month, the ban on fur farming passes into Norwegian law. It means new fur farms prohibited with immediate effect, and all existing fur farms dismantled by 2025.
Noah has been lobbying for the ban for three decades – that is stickability! “It’s totally unnatural and against these animals’ needs to keep them in very tiny metal cages.”
The babies are born in spring, smooth and furless. But by autumn they will have grown their thick glossy winter coats, brown, black or grey. Then the youngsters pay dearly for their gorgeous beauty, by being gassed and skinned.
So thank you Noah for never giving up on the animals.
It was a quirk of the contemporary political scene that finally tipped the scales in the animals’ favour. In echoes of 2010 in the UK, Norway’s Conservative party found themselves in a position where they were forced to invite the Liberals into a government of coalition. The Liberals said yes, but there was a condition. And the condition was – the fur farm ban.
Norway now joins the UK, Austria, the Czech Republic, and Croatia on the right side of fur farming history. In addition, regulations surrounding the cruel practice in Germany and Switzerland are so strict as to be effective as a ban.
Of course, not everyone is happy. The 200-strong Norwegian fur farmers’ association says the ban is “unjustified, illegal and undemocratic.” Fur farmer Kristian Aasen is enraged: “It’s unbelievable that a microscopic party that is today polling around two percent could impose its views on spineless politicians.”
Aasen farms 20 cows, and as a very lucrative sideline, 6,000 caged mink. He says he can’t make a living without them.
The government is offering financial assistance to dismantle the farms and help find other income strings. (One MP suggested the cultivation of medical cannabis.) But the fur farmers are pessimistic about finding alternatives. One thing is certain, animal farming will not be an option. Everyone knows what one of their number openly admits:
“There is already an overproduction of meat. We produce too much lamb, pork, chicken, milk.”
“My promise to the animals is this: You have all of me. The lioness in the circus—I see you. The pig in the sow stall—I see you. The mouse in the medical experimentation facility—I see you. The fish crushed at the bottom of a trawler net—I see you. I know your suffering, and I will never be silent. I will push forward no matter what life throws my way because the cruelties inflicted on you must end, and I’ll do all I can to see that happen. You have all of me.”
The stirring words of outspoken vegan activist Emma Hurst, representative of the Animal Justice Party(AJP), at her swearing in to Australia’s New South Wales State Parliament. She is now the third vegan activist elected to state office.
My last post “Isn’t it Time to Stop the Killing in the Name of Conservation“, cast the spotlight on the horrific scale of Australia’s ongoing slaughter of wild and feral animals. Still more blood is shed to ‘protect’ farmers’ and ranchers’ interests – without mentioning the unhappy fate of the farmed animals themselves. So it’s good to know Arian Wallach and the Centre for Compassionate Conservation are not alone in their campaign for kinder ways. Here is an introduction to the Animal Justice Party –
Last month vegan activists stopped the traffic in central Melbourne, while others demonstrated outside abattoirs. The Prime Minister Scott Morrison no less, said their activism was “un-Australian”, and bad-mouthed them as “green-collar criminals”. 40 of them were arrested. He declared his determination not to let them “pull the rug from under our Aussie farmers,” at present an industry worth $30 billion.
May 18th’s pivotal election
“Australians will return to the polls this Saturday in what’s becoming a pivotal election for animals and the environment. The big question: Will Australia’s next prime minister be friend or foe to the nation’s animal agriculture industry?”
Veganism in Australia
The country has more than 2 million vegans
Veganism is especially popular among younger voters
44 percent of young people (aged 18–24) think that veganism is “cooler than smoking.” (Certainly much healthier!)
The plant-based food industry there is forecasted to grow 58%by 2020
Why things have to change
1.8 billion animals have been killed for food in Australia so far this year and counting
70% of the $30 billion Australian agriculture is ‘worth’ comes from slaughtered animals
30% comes from milk, wool and eggs (which of course all also mean animal slaughter)
Last year the country exported 2.85 million living animals which suffered cruelly over long journeys in cramped shipping containers
2,400 sheep died of heat stress en route from Perth to the Middle East
Australia’s animal agriculture accounts for 11% of national emissions of GHGs
Over 20 year timescale that actually means 50% because methane has a stronger climate forcing effect
“Nearly 85 percent of the population that lives along the coast will be impacted by rising seas, storm surges, flooding, heatwaves, and damage to public infrastructure”
And climate change is already a big problem
Last year Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology issued four Special Climate Statements relating to “extreme” and “abnormal” heat, and reported broken climate records
With temperatures around 40°C in December last year, firefighters struggled to contain the 115 bush firesraging across Queensland
Piles of dead fox bats, whose brains literally fried in the heat, covered Sydney
For the last two years the country’s rainfall has been 11% below average
With the severe shortage of grazing on the parched land for their cattle, farmers in Western Australia have been struggling to find the money for the cost of feed, at $10,000 dollars per truckload
Farmers have also had to drive round with tankers of water to keep their thirsty cattle alive
In spite of all this, “as far as Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Parliament’s pro-farming majority are concerned, animals are no more than the means to a very profitable end for this Parliament.” (This attitude is what we are all up against.)
The Animal Justice Party, which doesn’t“prioritize a cattle and BBQ culture ahead of a livable climate,” but does, like Emma Hurst, prioritise animal rights, certainly has its work cut out.
If you live in Australia please vote this Saturday for the AJP.
“My promise to the animals is this: You have all of me.”
For the sake of the animals, please share this post widely. Thank you.
Sign Animals Australia’s petition against live exports here and take more actions for the animals here
“Humanity’s lust for meat is killing off Earth’s large animals”
“We are living on the planet of the chickens. The broiler (meat) chicken now outweighs all wild birds put together by three to one. It is the most numerous vertebrate (not just bird) species on land, with 23 billion alive at any one time. Across the world, chicken is the most commonly eaten meat.”
The tragic life of the broiler hen has become the symbol of the Anthropocene. And the world’s taste for its flesh and for the flesh of other animals is set to cause the in-our-lifetime extinction of at least 150 megafauna species – if we persist in eating so much meat.
But hang on a minute – can that even be true? Isn’t meat-eating in decline? Don’t we keep on hearing how veganism is skyrocketing?
According to a 2018 survey, 3.5 million UK citizens identified as vegan. That’s a 700% increase from 2016. There’s a similar 600% increase in the USA. And, “As of 2016, Asia Pacific holds the largest share of vegan consumers globally, with approximately nine percent of people following a vegan diet in this area.”
Google Trends concurs: in recent years there’s also been a huge growth of interest in veganism in Israel, Australia, Canada, Austria and New Zealand.
It all sounds like great news! So where’s the problem?
The problem is, the worldwide consumption of meat is winning the race by a long mile.
It has escalated by an alarming 500% since 1961. Of course some of that 500% can be accounted for by the exponential growth in the world’s population. But much is down to globalisation and people’s increasing prosperity. Populations that were traditionally plant-based eaters started to crave a less healthy Western diet, heavy in meat.
“Overall, we eat an excessive 300 million tons of meat every year, which translates to 1.4 billion pigs, 300 million cattle, and a whopping 62 billion chickens.” Which all amounts to an infinity of suffering for each and everyone of those sentient beings, creatures with lives of their own we seem to value so little.
Humans do though appear to care a great deal more about the megafauna. So, which are the megafauna being put in danger by humans’ rapacious appetite for meat? Many of them are those animals on which we humans seem to place the highest value, the most iconic, the most popular. The infographic illustrates the results of a poll into our favourite wild animals.
Image credits: Celine Albert / PLoS.
Just look at those species: every one of them is endangered or critically endangered.
But why is our eating meat threatening their survival? After all, we don’t go round eating tiger burgers or hippo steaks do we?
Well yes, in effect we do. By ‘we’ I mean of course our kind, humankind. “Direct harvest for human consumption of meat or body parts is the biggest danger to nearly all of the large species” that are under threat, says William Ripple, researcher at Oregon State University. So, “minimizing the direct killing of these animals is an important conservation tactic that might save many of these iconic species” and “the contributions they make to their ecosystems.”
There are two major issues here: the first is, as we know, the illegal trade in rhino horn, tiger bones, bear bile, pangolin scales and other endangered animal body parts, much of which is consumed in the mistaken belief it is medicinal. The second is bush meat – indigenous people hunting to survive. Both these hugely problematic issues merit far more space than I can give them here right now.
The meat doesn’t have to come from a tiger or a hippo for our carnivorous ways to put iconic species at risk.
To satisfy the growing demand for meat, livestock farming is rapidly devouring land that is crucial species-rich habitat, and turning it over to grazing pasture and monoculture crops for livestock feed. According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation “Livestock is the world’s largest user of land resources, with pasture and land dedicated to the production of feed representing almost 80% of the total agricultural land.”
In that hotspot of biodiversity, the Amazonian rainforest, cattle ranching accounts for 65 to 70 percent of all deforestation, and production of soya beans another 25 to 35 percent. Soya beans are “the world’s second most exported agricultural commodity.” After chickens presumably.
Rapidly losing habitat and under threat – the Amazonian jaguar, red macaw, & sloth
But before we start pointing the finger at the vegans making lattes with their soya milk, let’s note that 98 percentof soya bean production is fed to poultry, pigs and cattle, especially poultry, and only 1 percent is turned into people-food.
The 2017 World Wildlife Fund report, Appetite for Destruction identified crops grown to feed livestock as the“driving force behind wide-scale biodiversity loss.”
“By 2050, given current trends, 15 ‘mega-diverse’ countries will likely increase the lands used for livestock production by 30% to 50%. The habitat loss is so great that it will cause more extinctions than any other factor.” Our lust for meat is laying waste the habitats of the very wild animals we love the most. Habitats that are theirs by right.
We have to ask ourselves what kind of bleak and desolate wasteland, stripped bare of the most majestic of all Earth’s wondrous creatures, will be our legacy to our children, and their children. Such a stark future will be the price we’re forcing them to pay for our addiction to that meat on our fork.
If there is one thing each of us can do to give these iconic threatened species the best possible chance of survival, it has to be making changes to what we put on our dinner plates. It’s as simple as that.
“You eat a steak, you kill a lemur in Madagascar. You eat a chicken, you kill an Amazonian parrot.”
*******
You can #EatForThePlanet starting today. Just follow the three simple steps below.
1. Replace: Try to swap animal-based products in your daily diet with vegan alternatives (milk, butter, mayo, cheese, grilled chicken, beef crumbles, sausages, cold cuts, etc. For practically everything you can think of, there is a vegan version.) 2. Embrace:Add plant-based whole foods (local and organic when possible) to your diet like greens, fresh fruits, and vegetables, whole grains, plant proteins like lentils, nuts/seeds, beans, tofu, etc. 3. Moderate: Limit consumption of your favourite meats like beef, lamb, pork, etc.
Cover photo: Endangered Steller Sea Lions VLADIMIR BURKANOV / NOAA
If the 6th Age of Mass Extinctions we have now entered as a result of our own activities, sees off the human race along with all the other species on the planet, our epitaph might read (should there be a handy alien around to carve it in stone) “They thought theirs were good ideas at the time ….”
In The Magnificent Seven, this was the answer Vin (Steve McQueen) memorably gave to Calvera (Eli Wallach) when the bandit was so puzzled why a man like Vin decided to take the job of protecting the lowly villagers from his pillaging gang: “It seemed to be a good idea at the time ….”
In that instance, things turned out well – mostly. But so many of humankind’s bright ideas that did seem good at the time, have in the longer term proved to be runaway nightmares.
For all our cleverness, when it comes to gazing into the crystal ball to foresee where our handiwork might be leading, our talent is zero. Our remarkable human ability to turn every bright idea into concrete reality is matched by our singular inability to predict where those bright ideas might take us. Perhaps we are just eternal optimists, blind to any possible downsides.
Whatever, that blindness has sadly brought us to a point where 26,500 endangered and critically endangered species of plant and animal find themselves on IUCN’s Red List, thanks entirely to us.
Endangered: the California Condor, the Great Frigate bird & the Whooping Crane
Take that once-bright idea very much in the environmental spotlight recently. That material without which life as we know it is unimaginable. Plastic. Invented 1907. I know, I couldn’t believe it either. So useful it’s insinuated its way into every nook and cranny of our lives: from swimsuits to spaceships; cars to clingfilm; windows to wipes; aircraft to astroturf.
Plastic certainly has always seemed not just like a good idea, but a brilliant one. This ultra-handy substance managed to sneak well passed its centenary before we woke up to precisely what we’d let loose on the planet. How were we to know?
Futurology – the science of anticipation
Enter the futurists, those whose task it is to gaze at that crystal ball for us and forecast what kind of world new developments are propelling us towards. More than two dozen of these horizon scanners have got together with environmental scientists – William Sutherland, professor of conservation biology at Cambridge University at the helm – to put their collective finger on which emerging trends are likely to make an impact on Nature and biodiversity in 2019. Perhaps it’s not so surprising that they are hedging their bets on the outcomes of the trends they’ve identified, conscious that any one of them that seems like a good idea right now, may have unintended, unwanted, or even unforeseeable repercussions.
Emerging Trend for 2019 No. 1
And heyho we’re back to plastic
Remember when yellow plastic ducks first started washing up on beaches across the globe?¹ The thought of these tiny bath ducks ‘escaping’ and navigating the vastness of the oceans seemed no more than an amusing story at the time. There were actually 28,000 of them out there, a whole container load, lost overboard in the North Pacific in 1992.“That flotilla of escaped plastic ducks joins millions of Lego pieces, sneakers, styrofoam insulation, plastic crates and a plethora of other items lost at sea.“ It’s reckoned that containers lost overboard every year number in the thousands, and many of them filled with items made of plastic. Items that never even get to be used. A single container can carry 5 million plastic shopping bags.
Add that to the colossal amount of plastic we humans continue to actually use and throw away, and we have one enormous problem. We use 300 million tons of plastic each year, and at least 100 million marine mammals, a truly horrifying figure, are killed each year from plastic pollution.
After all this time, we’ve finally woken up to the environmental devastation our love of plastic has wreaked, and the trend the futurists identify is: people coming up with solutions.
An obvious one is to re-use plastic trash to produce something else we need. An ingenious professor of engineering in India has come up with a highly original use of plastic waste: turning it into hard-wearing, long-lasting roads.
“To date, thousands of kilometers of highways in India have been paved using the process he invented.”
Another approach is to make plastic plant-based and biodegradable, and NatureWorksbased in Minnesota, is doing just that. Their eco plastic ‘Ingeo’ is already in use in everything from 3D printing, through building construction and landscaping, to food packaging. Here’s how they do it.
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation is proposing a more fundamental shift – an economy based on better design, manufacture and recycling. At present we run on a linear economy – buy something, use it, throw it away. Some of our plastic trash does get recycled, but each time it is recycled, it becomes less and less usable. The Foundation would like to see a circular no-waste economy where items such as cellphones are designed and made so that at the end of their useful life they can be easily broken down into their component parts (glass, plastic, metal) ready to be recycled into equally high quality goods.
“Yay!” we say. All these ideas are impressive, aren’t they? But our futurists are cautious, unwilling to come down off the fence on one side or the other. Because how can they be sure that years down the line, we will not be repeating that refrain, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
As the futurists say,“From changes in recycling approaches, to the use of biological agents to degrade materials, to the manufacture of substitutes for conventional plastics from plants, [which as of now only makes up half a percent of all plastic produced] all alternatives will have ramifications of their own for food security, water use, ecosystem integrity and more. Not only that, but the promise they offer — whether it’s realized or not — could defuse other efforts to reduce rather than shift plastic consumption.”
NatureWorks though is in the early stages of a process to make biodegradable plastic straight from greenhouse gases without even using plants. Can this be anything but good?
And surely the futurists will applaud this brilliant idea from TerraCycle. It’s called Loop, for obvious reasons, and it’s based on the manufacturers of goods retaining ownership of containers and packaging. The consumer buys the products inside and then returns for free the packaging to be refilled. Zero waste!
If we can make drastic improvements in our plastic use, on an individual as well as corporate and international level, there may still remain sea turtles, whales, dolphins, sharks, sea birds et al, to thank us. They have precious little to thank us for right now.
No. 2 Sunscreen
In 1938 a Swiss chemistry student Franz Greiter got a touch of sunburn while climbing Mount Piz Buin in the Alps. So guess what he did – yes, he went home and invented the first sunscreen. And for decades since, sunscreen’s been protecting us from turning an uncomfortable shade of pink, as well as more serious health issues.
Then in 2016, sunscreen joined the ranks of those brainwaves that seemed so good at the time, but might actually have been a huge environmentally-costly mistake. In that year a scientific study was conducted to ascertain if oxybenzone, an active ingredient of the stuff, was damaging coral reefs. The researchers concluded that it was. And several islands and states in the world have already banned it.
Oh, if only there were something ‘greener’ we could use to block those harmful UV rays!
Well, there is. We can harvest it in small quantities straight from nature, from algae to be precise, and it goes by the appealing name of Shinorine. As of now scientists have proved they can synthesise it. The next step is to scale up production.
Once again, our futurists are reluctant to come down on one side or the other. Is Shinorine going to be good for the environment, or prove as harmful as oxybenzone? All they will tell us is, “Widespread adoption of shinorine without sufficient research could expose corals or other aquatic and marine organisms to a new substance with unknown impacts.”
They are undoubtedly right to err on the side of caution. If only we had been so wise before we unleashed all our agrochemicals, our agro-waste, and yes, our plastic, our fossil fuel gases, our nuclear power, and indeed a superabundance of ourselves on to suffering Nature.
No. 3 Making rain
Last week, “the Department of Royal Rainmaking and Agricultural Aviation said it was preparing to deploy two planes for cloud seeding between Tuesday and Friday, if conditions are suitable.” Right now Bangkok is shrouded in a pall of smog, and Thailand’s Department of Royal Rainmaking hopes a downpour of the wet stuff will clear the air. (On the website there is a tab called “The King and the Royal Rain”)
Meanwhile in Tibet, China is poised to send up a battery of rockets to release silver-iodide particles in the clouds, with the aim of making it rain over 1.6 million square kilometres of land, a vast area almost the size of Mexico. In 2017, northern China suffered its worst drought on record, With their rockets they hope to ensure water security for their own people, especially farmers, downstream.
Cloud-seeding has been around since the 1940s, but nothing on this kind of scale has ever been attempted before. Unsurprisingly, this is worrying our futurists. They fear such a dramatic alteration to the weather will damage Tibet’s rare alpine steppe and meadow ecosystems, in turn threatening its rare endemic species.
Photos from Wild Animals on the Tibetan Plateau²
Tibet is already the one of the largest sources of freshwater in the world, in third place after the North and South Poles. 46% of the world’s population rely on water originating in that country. Tibet, the Roof of the World, high in the Himalayas, lies three miles above sea level, its water feeding 10 major riversacross 11 countries of South-East Asia.
There are no simple certainties about the Chinese plan. It could all go horribly wrong, and have who knows what consequences, not just on the Tibetan plateau, but across a vast expanse of the globe. It certainly has the perturbing potential to be yet another bright idea that seemed like a good idea at the time…
No. 4 Fishy oilseed crops
The possibilities of genetic engineering are endless. So advanced are we as a species, we now have the knowhow to redesign almost every living thing to our own requirements. So why not modify oil-producing crops to produce “the omega-3 fatty acids that are normally found in fish and prized for their health-promoting capabilities.”Fantastic, especially for vegetarians and vegans. And the wild fish populations.
But… Why does there always have to be a but! The modification will displace some of the plants’ natural oils. How will this affect the insects that feed on them? If one study showing caterpillars metamorphosing into butterflies with deformed wings is anything to go by, the answer is “badly”.
It’s a zero-sum game. Benefitting one side of the equation (us) automatically means disadvantaging the other. This is true of so many of our bright ideas from the past. Yet we still don’t seen to have grasped that disadvantaging other animals, the environment, Nature, in pursuit of our own ends is only a short-term fix that is certain to boomerang back on us. And time is running out.
Other trends the futurists identified
that will make themselves felt one way or another in the environment this year include:
microbial protein for livestock
deeper sea fishing
modification of plant microbiomes
the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture’s decision not to regulate the use of gene editing in plants
Insect mass-rearing, though in its infancy is apparently a fast-growing industry. The unfortunate cricket can be fed on nothing but weeds and agricultural by-products, making it a source of protein far more sustainable than the animals we more usually associate with farming.
“Reared insects are increasingly seen as an environmentally friendly alternative to meat, even by the United Nations. The future food for a growing world population.” And a readily available source of protein for malnourished children.“Even very poor people would be able to rear crickets.”³
b. Biodiversity offsets
We’ve grown familiar with the idea of carbon offsets. If you need to take a flight somewhere, you can buy yourself enough carbon creditto offset your own portion of the plane’s emissions. Then the money is used in climate protection projects.
Biodiversity offsets work on a similar principle. Setting aside protected areas for Nature to compensate for and minimise the impact of large-scale industrial projects like new mines or dams, or at the other end of the scale, new housing. Recent research discovered 12,983 of these set-aside habitat projects across 73 countries occupying an area larger than Greece. “153,000 square kilometres is a big chunk of land.” And in spite of its being a relatively new idea, it’s catching on fast.
“This is the start of something major,”says researcher Dr Bull, “‘Biodiversity offsets – ‘No Net Loss’ policies, seeking to protect our natural environment, are being implemented very quickly.”
One final trend the futurists have hope for – Insurance for Nature
The futurists picked up on a joint project involving the Mexican government, the Mexican tourist industry, The Nature Conservancy, and – of all things – the insurance industry. Between them they have set up a trust fund to protect the Mesoamerican Reef in the Caribbean. The fund can be called upon for restoration projects in the case of damage to the reef. In effect, the reef is insured.
The futurists think schemes like this have potential for the insurance industry to “play a role in protecting natural areas and helping damaged habitat recover from disasters.” The model could be replicated worldwide to preserve and restore Nature.
Are they right? Where will it all end? Can our clever innovations save the planet and us with it? Or will they just turn out to be more of our brainwaves that seemed like a good idea at the time? Any crystal ball gazers out there?
Take the Conservation International pledge to be a Voice for the Planet #newdealfornature
¹“Many of these toys inadvertently became part of a massive scientific study: beachcombers have been finding them ever since, helping oceanographers refine their models of ocean surface currents.” The Science Museum
² Clockwise – the Tibetan antelope, the pika, the Tibetan blue bear, the Tibetan wild ass, the snow leopard and the Tibetan wolf
³ This one is not for me as a vegan. But then, I’m fortunate enough not to have to live in poverty with malnourished children
Recycle your plastic bottle tops with Lush –here’s how
“Betsy the rogue rodeo cow has been hiding in the woods for months. Not even the real-life cowboys can get Betsy out of Anchorage’s 4,000 acre park.”
The stories keep on coming of these spunky cows who’ve had the smarts – and found the courage – to make their bid for freedom. Betsy took the slimmest of chances to slip away from Anchorage’s annual rodeo last June and is still on the lam.
Last year there was Swoboda (Freedom), the runaway cow wild wintering with bison near the Bialowieza Forest in Poland. We have yet to discover how her fortune will unfold. (If anyone has more recent news, I’d love to hear it.)
Closely following on her hoofs was Hermien, the Dutch cow who broke free when she was being loaded on to a truck headed for the slaughterhouse. She spent weeks hiding out in the woods and became a media sensation. A crowdfunding campaign raised money to guarantee her right to live out her natural lifespan in a the peace and safety of a sanctuary.
Here is Hermien, roaming free
Then back in Poland, the story of another remarkable bovine. A story that ended in undeserved tragedy. I chose to call her Duch, Polish for ‘Spirit’
“When workers opened her pen to transport her to the slaughterhouse, the animal made a daring and spectacular break for it.
“According to Polish news station Wiadomosci, she broke free from her handlers and repeatedly rammed a metal fence until it burst open.” Cornered by farmers she plunged into the icy water of Lake Nysa and swam to an island. After there had been several failed attempts to capture her, Polish politician and former singer Paweł Kukiz, impressed by her spirit, offered to buy the determined cow and let her live out her years in peace.
But sad to say, she never made it. She died of stress on the truck bringing her back. This is proud Duch below
Duch (pic from politician and former singer Paweł Kukiz’s Facebook page)
Then there is Betsy, enjoying her freedom now for 7 whole months in Far North Bicentennial Park. Her owner Frank Koloski is “just totally exhausted from looking day in and day out.” He has “received dozens of tips from park users who have seen her calmly meandering down the park’s snow-covered trails.” But she still eludes capture. Don’t worry, in spite of the freezing Alaskan winter, Betsy is fine. Alaskan cattle are “tough and accustomed to the area’s harsh winters.”She will be lonely though. Cows, like us, need their friends.
How good it would be to see the next chapter of Betsy’s life panning out like Brianna’s happy-ever-after.
Earlier this month, Brianna, another of these remarkable clever and courageous cows, was herded on to a cattle truck in New Jersey. Destination slaughterhouse. With less than 10 minutes left of the journey to her death, she leapt from the second storey of the truck down on to the highway, a drop of 8 feet.
Luckily Brianna was rewarded for her pluck. She was taken in by Skylands Animal Sanctuary where the vet checked her over and pronounced her surprisingly unharmed from her ordeal. And only two days later Brianna gave birth to a beautiful calf. Her act of courage had saved the life of her unborn too. Now mother and babe will live out their days together in peace and safety.
Finn the calf is the most recent of the runaways. He spent weeks hiding away in snowy woods to save his life. Like Brianna’s, Finn’s story has a happy-ever-after ending – he is now safe at Farm Sanctuary’s Watkin’s Glen. Read more of his adventure here
You may draw your own conclusions from these true life stories. These are mine:-
These six fascinate us, and the others who made a break for it before them, precisely because they stand out from the herd. They have made themselves known to us as individuals. We see real personalities – that they are persons.
We identify with their fear and desire to escape a violent death, and cheer them on.
We identify with their desire to live, and to be free from tyranny, free from having their fate determined for them by others – a life in subjection, and a life then taken from them prematurely.
These bold and brave creatures make for great stories. But the truth is, while we are applauding their exploits, we forget all the others in the herds from which they come. And each and every cow in every herd everywhere also has its own personality – maybe not all as determined and spirited as our five heroines, but smart, gentle, loving, shy, patient, loyal… Each and everyone different, a person in her own right.
Article 3. Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
Article 4. No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.
Article 5. No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
If we see in Swoboda, Hermien and Duch, Brianna and Betsy the same qualities, desires, instincts, emotions we can see in ourselves, do they and all the rest not merit at leastthose 3 rights, which surely every living being on the planet deserves?
I mourn for Duch who deserved so much better, and fervently hope that Swoboda and Hermien have been, and Betsy will be, taken to a place of safety where they can relish the sun on their backs and the grass under their feet with no more fear for their lives.
Most of all, I hope that their stories will challenge us to see the nameless, numberless creatures we force into our service as the individuals they truly are, and give them the respect and the right to a life free from harm they surely deserve.
If you think so too, or even if you don’t, please take a look at some animals already happy, contented, safe in sanctuary – and others who know they are destined to die.
And what better way to honour the memory of poor Duch, whose amazing spirit for life and freedom in the end, and through no fault of her own, failed to save her, than by checking out simple steps to transitioning your diet.
Then hercourageous life and saddeath will not have been in vain.
This photo of a bull shot by police in Germany after he’d escaped from a slaughter truck gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “the meat aisle”
The picture¹ above is, for German documentary photographer Nikita Teryoshin,
“A symbol of human control over cows – how we can look into the cow and see everything.
“I wanted to update the old-fashioned image of a cow in a green meadow that weknow from ads and milk packages. To show the dystopian side of milk production.”
The images in Teryoshin’s book Hornless Heritageexpress the shock he felt visiting the EuroTier agricultural fair in Hanover, a shock which prompted his 4-year scrutiny of this industry in his home country, and was the impetus for his book.
At the centre of the dairy industry is, of course, the cow. A cow falls into the zoological class of Mammalia. And the dictionary definition of the word “Mammal” is:
Any of a class (Mammalia) of warm-blooded higher vertebrates that nourish their young with milk secreted by mammary glands
“That nourish their young with milk secreted by mammary glands” – the way Nature intended. But nothing about the German dairy industry bears much relation to Nature. Indeed, today’s dairy production practically all over in the world is so far from the storybook idyll of contented cows grazing in flower-filled meadows with the sun on their backs – the image the industry wants us to believe – that there surely must be a case for referring dairy product ads everywhere to their countries’ equivalents of our Advertising Standards Authority on the grounds of “false or deceptive messages”.²
What does the image below look like to you? What it doesn’t look like to me is a farm. But then, it doesn’t actually lay claim to that name. It calls itself an ‘automated dairy facility’, and is certainly closer to a factory than how most people imagine a farm.
Model of a state-of-the-art automated dairy facility at the EuroTier trade fair in Hanover, Germany. Nikita Teryoshin
This is journalist Laura Mallone describing Teryoshin’s experience of the EuroTier fair, “The crowds gawked at the latest in animal husbandry, including a Matrix-like robot that suckled a fake cow. But what struck Teryoshin most was an ad that read,
‘Don’t let cows waste your money’
“‘It seemed impossible that you could think that a cow is wasting your money when you’re already taking everything away from it,” he says.”
Presentation of a hoof trimming chute at the EuroTier trade fair in Hanover, Germany.Nikita Teryoshin
That prompted him to begin Hornless Heritage. Teryoshin visited farms, insemination stations, laboratories, auctions and even a Best in Show, where owners primped their Holsteins and paraded them before a crowd. He got an up-close glimpse of seemingly happy cows like Lady Gaga—a black-and-white Holstein that’s won bovine beauty pageants—as well as clearly unhappy ones, such as those with bloodied legs he saw on a factory farm. He documented everything with a Nikon D800 and hand-held flash, illuminating the mundane horror of an industry where animals are reduced to commodities.
Artificial insemination. Nikita Teryoshin
‘German’ : ‘Efficiency’. Two words forever joined at the hip. Teryoshin witnessed the essence of ‘Vorsprung Durch Technik’ (progress through technology) applied to cows exactly as to cars. Maximising profit by reducing living animals to nothing more than milk-producing machines, their natural needs only being met as far as they further that end.
Model of a milking rotary at the EuroTier trade fair in Hanover, Germany. Nikita Teryoshin
Teryoshin writes, “Also known as ‘turbo cows’, German dairy breeds, like German cars, are very popular all over the world because of their performance and reliability. Thanks to computer technologies in the last decades German scientists got millions of breeding values together and a knowledge about the genomic code, which allows them to design the ‘Übercow’ with up to four times higher milk output, and even the horns disappearing,”
Based in Verden, the company VIT maintains data for millions of cattle in Europe. These numbers show the full genome of a cow. Nikita Teryoshin
In evolution, “horns mean for a cow protection and autonomy. They are even important for the milk performance and overall condition of the animal. For life in huge fully automated farms with hundreds of cows, horns are too dangerous. After decades of painful dehorning of cattle with a branding iron, German breeders and scientists in the future will produce cows hornless by birth yet with the same milk performance.”
Germany’s dairy facts
Germany is the EU’s biggest milk producer
The country has 4.2 million cows
Today, farmers use genomic selection to design ever-more-profitable ‘turbo’ cows that can produce more than 88,000 pounds of milk in their lifetimes
These servers sit in the basement of the VIT center in Verden, Germany. They contain genomic information about millions of bulls and cows. Nikita Teryoshin
Cows used to live about 20 years. Now they end up canned and packaged in the pet food aisle of supermarkets before the age of 5, sent to slaughter because of lameness, infertility or mastitis
Such are the miracles of technology, in a life lasting only a quarter of the time of her great-great-great grandmother’s, a German cow can now be made to produce at least double and up to 4 times as much milk
In 2018, Germany produced from its ‘turbo cows’ 8.6 billion gallons – enough for 104 gallons/473 litres per person – in one year. About 1.3 litres per person per day – milk Nature intended for the nurture of these mothers’ babies, which have been taken from them.
A farmer spray paints a cow before an auction in Krefeld, Germany. Nikita Teryoshin
“’I stopped drinking milk and eating dairy for a while,’ Teryoshin says. His photographs might make you lose your appetite for the stuff, too.”
Only for a while, Nikita? What a shame. How desperately sad that you should so readily forget the shock you experienced peeling away the dairy industry’s green pastures fantasy to uncover the technologised nightmare beneath – the pitiful existence of a mammal mother, intended only by Nature to suckle her own, that is today’s Übercow.
Yes, we can indeed “look into her and see everthing”. Everything that is except the one thing that matters – her soul.
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It’s not too late to join the Veganuary movement and discover simple and tasty ways to eat dairy-free
And everything you ever need to know (well, almost!) about going vegan here
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Oh, if only there were something ‘greener’ we could use to block those harmful UV rays!
Animalista Untamed 