The Reindeer’s Story – Fantasy & Fact

,,,what to my wondering eyes did appear

But a miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer

With a little old driver so lively and quick

I knew in a moment he must be St Nick*

Father Christmas in his sleigh, Donner, Blitzen, Dancer, Prancer and the rest, an image beloved of children generation after generation, made their first appearance in the starry winter sky nearly 200 years ago in 1823. But Rudolph was just too darn cosy in his straw-filled stable at the North Pole. It was another 100 years plus (1939) before he first poked his red nose outside, and was promptly appointed Santa’s right hand reindeer. I know Vixen, life is not fair.

It’s likely though that this bizarre-when-you-think-about-it vision of Santa and his reindeer flying across the night sky has far deeper roots:

“According to the theory, the legend of Santa derives from shamans in the Siberian and Arctic regions who dropped into locals’ teepee-like homes with a bag full of hallucinogenic mushrooms as presents in late December. 

“As the story goes, up until a few hundred years ago, these practicing shamans or priests connected to the older traditions would collect Amanita muscaria (the Holy Mushroom), dry them and then give them as gifts on the winter solstice. Because snow is usually blocking doors, there was an opening in the roof through which people entered and exited, thus the chimney story.”*

Little wonder our ancestors were dreaming dreams of magic!

Reindeer facts

• The festive sleigh-pulling team contrary to popular belief is comprised entirely of females – yes, even Rudolph. Though both sexes of reindeer wear antlers, the males only need theirs for the autumn rut and shed them well before Christmas
• In the winter the animals live almost exclusively on “reindeer moss” (lichen) and cover long distances to find it, travelling the furthest of any land mammal in the world, up to 5,000 km a year
• They can run at up to 80 kph
• They are smaller than you think, standing at only 1.2m at the shoulder
• They have clowns’ feet – wide spreading hooves that make perfect snowshoes, shovels to shift snow (to get at the food beneath) and paddles for swimming
• It’s true they do have unusual noses – not normally red – because they are furry. In fact their special insulating hollow fur covers every bit of a reindeer’s body from furry nose to furry feet, except of course their eyes. Their coat is one of the thickest and densest of any animal
• They talk to each other with their feet. When the herd is moving, “they make a delicate clicking or popping sound. Being surrounded by a small herd sounds a bit like being in a bowl of puffed rice as the milk is poured on to it”
• Once reindeer roamed the hills of northern England and Scotland. They were hunted by the Vikings
• In the 1950s a small herd was reintroduced to the Cairngorms and are now 130 strong
• Elsewhere they can now be found only in Russia and Norway
• This naturally curious and gentle creature was a prime candidate – thought to be the first with hooves – for humans to domesticate, 30,000 years ago in Scandinavia
• Like so many animals, their usefulness to humans (milk, meat, skins) meant their being hunted almost to extinction
• In southern Norway, there remain only 20 herds, about 40,000 deer in all

In reality, having to pull Santa’s sleigh all around the world, arduous as that sounds, is the least of Rudolph’s problems

The main threats to these beautiful animals, along with nonhuman animals the world over, are human-caused: habitat fragmentation and destruction; roads carving up the forest; house-building; oil, gas and timber extraction. And global warming – the timber line is creeping northwards and shrinking the arctic tundra on which the reindeer rely.

Another serious cause for concern is inbreeding. Reindeer females don’t seem able, as many species of animals do, to select mates from outside their immediate group, and will frequently mate with males too closely related to them. Direct human interference has exacerbated the problem. Large numbers of males were removed from the herds in the 70s, to increase the preponderance of females and produce more young. The intended outcome was more reindeer to hunt. The unintended outcome was a further shrinking of the gene pool.

Shooting rights up for grabs

If you have a yen to celebrate the season of goodwill with a killing spree and have enough spare cash, the Norwegian government has opened up two of their largest national parks for you to slaughter any number of the last surviving wild population of these gentle creatures in Europe.

The business selling the tickets for such a trip, for which it claims exclusive rights, styles itself “Scotland’s Premier Sporting Agency“. Shooting reindeer in Norway is, it says, “a magical experience”. (And feel free to take a pop at bears and wolves, both critically endangered in Norway, while you’re there.) This is the picture promoting the trip on the agency’s website

A very different kind of Christmas magic.

What can we do?

Support the League Against Cruel Sports’s campaign against trophy hunting

Sign the petition asking the Norwegian government to End the reindeer slaughter in Norway

And help stop the exploitation and abuse of reindeer here in the UK at Christmas:

Support Animal Aid’s reindeer campaign 

Sign the petition Stop using live reindeer at Keswick Christmas fair!

Sign the petition Stop reindeer exploitation

 

Cover pic courtesy of Focusing on Wildlife

*Anthropologist John Rush for LiveScience

* * *

Postscript

The fate of reindeer and wolves is inextricably linked. Find out more about what is happening to Norway’s wolves.

Sources

The Reindeer’s story: How our No.1 Christmas animal is suffering

Animal Christmas Stories

Rich Trophy Hunters Pay to Shoot Reindeer in the Wild

A Visit from St Nicholas by Clement C Moore

Related posts

Christmas Spoiler – Rudolph is an Impostor!

How Do Squirrels Remember Where They Buried Their Nuts?

Gifts Animals Give – & Strictly No Socks!

 

What We Never Knew We Needed – The Floating Dairy Farm

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 reasons why 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 Conversation examines 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 reasons to 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.

Featured image Beladon

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Postscript

Cows on a floating farm may be new, but floating farms themselves are not. In Bangladesh, the practice dates back thousands of years

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Anything else you might want to know about dairy and going dairy-free here

 

Sources

Floating dairy farm debuts in the Netherlands

The Dutch are subverting nature again—with floating dairy farms

Dairy Farmers Risk Damage to Market with Oversupply – Press Reader

Related posts

No Green Meadows for the ‘Übercow’ of Today

Dairy in decline? It’s Not That Black & White

Mountains of Milk, Lakes of Cheese, & What We Can Do About It

Why Cows Need Their Friends

A Cow Named ‘Spirit’

Are Meat & Dairy Really Bad for Sustainability & the Planet?

Norway to Ban the Farming of Fur

“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.”

Someone needs to tell them –

The future is plant-based!

Go vegan!

Sign the petition to make a fur-free Britain here

 

Source

Days are numbered for Norway’s fur farms

Further reading

The Labour Party pledges to ban fur imports to the UK

 

 

“My promise to the animals is this: You have all of me”

“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 fires raging 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

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Sources

Australia Swears in Third Vegan Activist to State Parliament – Sentient Media

Australia’s 2018 in weather: drought, heat and fire 

Related posts

Eat a Steak, Kill a Lemur, Eat a Chicken, Kill a Parrot

Eight Women Changing the World for Animals Part 2

Why I Love Women, Especially Loud Vegan Women

Isn’t it Time to Stop the Killing in the Name of Conservation

 

Eat a Steak, Kill a Lemur – Eat a Chicken, Kill a Parrot

“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 percent of 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.” 

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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.

and Take Extinction Off Your Plate – why we need to rewild our plates today

Free up more land for wildlife – Info @

Forks Over Knives   Vegan Society   Vegan Outreach    PETA    Viva!

It’s soooo easy!

Related posts

Are You Really Helping the Planet Eating Plant-Based? Yes! And This Awesome App Shows You Just How Much

If everyone on Earth ate a Western diet, we would need two Planet Earths to feed us. We’ve only got one and she’s dying

The Living Planet Report: Our Dinner Plates are Destroying Life on Earth

Are Meat & Dairy Really Bad for the Planet?

When Everyone is Telling You Meat is the Bad Guy

Sources

Humanity’s lust for meat is killing off Earth’s large animals

Meat-eaters may speed worldwide species extinction, study warns

No Green Meadows for the ‘Übercow’ of Today

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 we know from ads and milk packages. To show the dystopian side of milk production.”

The images in Teryoshin’s book Hornless Heritage express 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

You can see more of Hornless Heritage here

Interesting read: Nazi super cows: British farmer forced to destroy half his murderous herd of bio-engineered Heck cows after they try to kill staff

Related posts

Dairy in Decline? It’s Not That Black & White

Mountains of Milk, Lakes of Cheese, & What We Can Do About It

Why Cows Need Their Friends

A Cow Named ‘Spirit’

Are Meat & Dairy Really Bad for Sustainability & the Planet?

Source

Capturing the Everyday Horror of Dairy Farming in Germany

¹The photo depicts the Free University of Berlin’s anatomical model of this animal. 

²Marketing and Advertising: the law

Updates

5th July 2019  New dairy cattle breeding method increases genetic selection efficiency

Marvels in Lego – Animal Art with a Sting in the Tail?

Like many of us, German artist Felix Jaensch began building with Lego when he was just a tot – in his case three years old. Unlike him, at some point most of us stopped. But he never did. Now 30, and with 27 solid years of practice with those finickety little blocks behind him, he’s surely earned the title of Lego Master Extraordinaire.

For the last 5 years his focus has been the animal kingdom. He tells us, “I was always fascinated by nature and biodiversity and I like to build organic forms with these angular bricks.”  

If you wanted to create art, you would think hard, unyielding Lego in all its angular and geometric shapes is an unpromising material. But Felix sees it as “a great medium for 3-D art”, and his work speaks for itself. To capture the essence of the living creature using nothing but plastic Lego bricks as he has done, seems to me an impossibly difficult achievement little short of magic.

This may be my personal favourite.

Or is it this one? This pooch is so alive, I practically expect to hear her bark. See which of these awesome sculptures grabs you most.

(By the way, if you’re imagining it must take an age to build one of these, you would be right. “Small animals may be finished in just some hours, big projects can take months. But I never counted the hours or bricks which I spend on one sculpture. I often modify some details even months after I finished an animal”, says Felix.)

So, what could possibly be the sting in the tail of Felix’s amazing body of work?

Whatever merits Lego has, and it undoubtedly has many, it is still plastic – a dirty word in 2018.

I haven’t been able to discover Felix’s thoughts on the disastrous effect plastic is having in the world, but the Lego company itself does have thoughts. Earlier this year, the huge corporation, producer of plastic, more plastic, and nothing but plastic, sought to mitigate any criticism it might attract for having a business model intrinsically inimical to the environment, by announcing that it planned to make its tiny green Lego trees and plants out of real plants! Sugar cane to be precise, in place of the oil from which plastic is most often made. Good news? Or just cynically jumping on the environmental bandwagon, ‘green-washing’, nothing more than a bit of opportunistic window dressing? These are the facts:

• All plastic is made from ethanol, whether extracted from oil or plants. The new Lego parts will be indistinguishable from the other bricks – that’s because they are identical 

• Lego trees and plants make up only a tiny tiny fraction of Lego’s output, and the rest of the bricks remain firmly oil-based

• It’s true that Brazilian sugar cane has a somewhat smaller carbon footprint than oil, but in reality it is only by the slightest of margins more sustainable. Farming it on a large scale wipes out precious habitat (think Amazonian rainforest), uses up valuable resources, pollutes with herbicides and pesticides, and displaces local farmers

• Either way, plant-based plastic is no more biodegradable than plastic from oil, and when broken down in small pieces will pollute the environment like any other plastic

Looking on the brighter side, Lego is, as we all know, kid-proof and virtually indestructible. When one child has outgrown it – unlike Felix who looks like he never will, and more power to him – those bricks can be passed on to others, used and re-used. Lego plastic is decidedly not – Collin’s Dictionary Word of the Year – ‘single-use’.

Meanwhile, let’s not go away thinking Felix excludes the human animal from his magnificent menagerie. Below: what is said to be an anatomically-correct human skull in Lego.

But whereas all Felix’s other animals are so intensely bright and alert they almost seem to have the breath of life in them, we humans are represented by a death’s head.  Make of that what you will!

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If you haven’t seen your favourite animal here, check out Felix’s Flickr account.

All designs, photos and video copyrighted to Felix Jaensch

Some of his creations can be purchased from Mochub

Sources

Masterfully Designed Lego Animals by Felix 

3D Lego Animal Sculptures by Felix Jaensch

‘Sustainable’ Lego: Why plastic from plants won’t solve the pollution crisis

Related posts

A Cutting Sword Lays Open the Miracle of Nature

“The Serious Intensity of Being’ in Animal Art

Endangered Animals As You’ve Never Seen Them Before

Step into a Miniature World of Animated Paper Wildlife

 

 

A Cow Named ‘Spirit’

“There’s an island in the middle of a Polish lake, where, for a few strange weeks, one cow ruled supreme. And woe to anyone who tried to set foot on that island.”

(Cover pic from politician and former singer Paweł Kukiz’s Facebook page)

A week or two ago we heard about 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.

Closely following on her hoofs is Hermien, the Dutch cow who broke free when she was being loaded on to a truck headed for the slaughterhouse. She has spent weeks hiding out in the woods and has become a media sensation. A crowdfunding campaign is raising money to guarantee her right to live out her natural lifespan in a the peace and safety of a sanctuary – if they are able to coax her out of the woods she has made home.

Here is Hermien, roaming free

Now back once more to Poland for the story of this other remarkable, until now unnamed bovine. A story that ends in undeserved tragedy.

I choose 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.

“Then she went fugitive.

“The cow made it to the edge of nearby Lake Nysa, where she was at last cornered by the farmers. But not so fast. The animal managed to break the arm of one of her handlers before plunging into the icy waters.

“I saw her diving underwater,” one of the farmers told Wiadomosci.

“A short time later, the cow appeared on the shores of one of the lake’s islands. And the farmer, hoping to keep her alive, left food for her there every day.

“But plans were afoot to draw this surreal saga to a close. After the local fire department failed in its bid to bring the cow back by boat — she refused to let anyone get near — the farmer mulled shooting the animal.

“Fortunately, by this time, the cow had found an unlikely, yet equally fierce ally. After hearing of her exploits, Polish politician and former singer Paweł Kukiz offered to buy the determined cow and let her live out her years in peace.

“A few days later Kukiz announced that media attention — radio and television outlets had joined the chorus to save the cow — had convinced the farmer to spare the cow.”

“Kukiz received assurances, he noted, that the cow would enjoy a ‘peaceful pension without the prospect of butcher knife.'”

“But an island is no place for a cow. Not even this fiery bovine empress. On Thursday, a team that included a veterinarian visited the island in an effort to bring her to a farm, where she could get proper care.

“The bovine bucked. She was tranquilized. Officials say she died on the truck. From stress.”

You may draw your own conclusions from these true life stories. These are mine:-

We are wowed and fascinated by these three, and others who made a break for it before them, precisely because they stand out from the herd. They have made themselves know to us as individuals. We see they have real personalities – that they are persons.

We identify with their fear and desire to escape a violent death.

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 three bold and brave personalities 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 three heroines, but smart, gentle, loving, shy, patient, loyal… Each and everyone different, a person in her own right.

These are three of the articles in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:-

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.

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”

If we see in Swoboda, Hermien and Duch what we can see in ourselves, do they and all the rest not merit at least those 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 will be taken safely to a place 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 her courageous life and sad death will not have been in vain.

 

Sources

A cow’s incredible bid for freedom ends in tragedy

Heroic cow escapes trip to slaughterhouse, hides in Dutch forest for weeks

Cow who fled Queens slaughterhouse saved by animal activist

Cattle run loose in St. Louis after breaking free from slaughterhouse

These Videos May Prove Animals Know When They’re Next in Line to Die

Related posts

The Runaway Cow Wild Wintering With Bison

In the Eyes of a Cow

High Schools Across China Are Now Offering Animal Welfare Courses!

“In a long due yet still impressive act of growth, the Chinese Ministry of Education has added an animal welfare course for high schools and students.”

This is MAJOR good news, so welcome after everything anti-animal and anti-nature emanating from the other side of the Pacific in the USA, a country which is travelling back into the dark ages under the present administration.

What makes the news even more exciting is that China has a population of 1.411 billion¹, the largest of any country in the world. And approximately 30% of them are aged between 0 – 24 years². That is a lot of young people, and they will be the ones to shape the country’s future.

Can we hope this is a turning point in Chinese attitudes towards animals and Nature? There have been some exciting trends in the last couple of years –

• Just last week at a media event in Beijing, China announced it will host the 11th World Wilderness Congress (Wild11) in 2019
• In 2016 the Chinese government formulated a vision to become the ecological civilization of the 21st century
• Also in 2016, this vast country – which accompanying its growing affluence had seen an off-the-scale increase in demand for meat and diary in the last couple of decades – announced its plan to cut meat consumption by 50% – a move warmly welcomed by environmentalists and animal-lovers alike
• And in 2017, then the market for 70% of ivory, China announced its ban on the ivory trade
• Now “China’s State Oceanic Administration (SOA) earlier this month announced it will dramatically curb commercial development of coastal wetlands. “I’ve never heard of anything quite so monumental,” says Nicola Crockford of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds U.K., which has worked to protect habitat of migratory birds in China and elsewhere.”

Does China need to keep making changes? It so does. In spite of there being a growing animal advocacy movement in recent years, the country and its people at large still have a reputation for horrific cruelty to animals.

Bear bile farming 

Bears are kept in cages sometimes so small they cannot stand up or turn around in them. Bile is extracted from the living bear’s gallbladder as an ingredient for traditional Chinese medicine. Most of the bears are starved and dehydrated and suffer from multiple diseases and malignant tumours that end up killing them.

Dogs and cats

Are cruelly slaughtered for their meat. Often they are stolen pets. They suffer broken limbs being transported vast differences without food or water to meat markets.

Animal in Zoos

Kept in small barren cages. Some such as elephants in chains. Live (and terrified) hens, cows, donkeys and pigs are dropped into the enclosure of lions and tigers for the entertainment of the crowds. The animals are often cruelly broken by trainers to force them to perform. Tigers and lions have their teeth ripped and claws ripped out. Babies are removed from their mothers for lucrative photo ops.

Donkeys for Ejaio

Donkeys hit with sledgehammers before having their throats slit. Then skinned. Their skins are rendered down into ejaio, a gelatin considered to be a cure for all ills in traditional Chinese medicine.

Illegal imports of endangered animal parts in huge quantities from around the world

Animals Used in Science

Even now Chinese scientists have announced their breakthrough cloning of 2 macaques. They and further cloned monkeys will be used for animal testing. Scientists have also perfected the technology for creating the human/pig hybrid – ‘incubating’ human hearts in pigs. The intention is to use pigs to produce a regular supply for human heart transplants.

At this point China has no kind of animal welfare laws in place. There is much that needs to change if we are to credit the country with any sense of humanity towards nonhuman animals. So, if these Animal Welfare classes can open up Chinese youth to a newfound empathy with and compassion for their fellow creatures, we can hope for some big changes in the not-too-distant-future. For once, some animal news to get excited about!

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(The cover photo is there simply because I couldn’t resist its absolute gorgeousness. Hopefully the endangered red panda will eventually be a beneficiary of this step forward in the education of Chinese children.)

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Postscript

China, of course is scarcely the only culprit treating animals with scant regard for their welfare. It has to be said that even in countries like the UK and the US with long established animal protection laws, there are still so many ways both domesticated animals and wildlife experience cruelty at human hands.

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Updates

8th March 2018 Massive new panda national park in China will try to save the iconic species

¹Demographics of China

².Indexmundi

Sources

High Schools Across China Are Now Offering Animal Welfare Courses! – One Green PlanetOne Green Planet

Facts about Cruelty to Animals in Asia

China moves to protect coastal wetlands used by migratory birds

Related posts

World First – China’s Bird Airport

Hands Clasped Across the River for Two Big Cats

The Next Extinction – Donkeys??

When Everyone is Telling You Meat is the Bad Guy

 

12 Sexy Camels Kicked Out of Beauty Contest for Using Botox

That title I shamelessly borrowed¹. The story itself is so insane, I could not come up with a better. But crazy as it sounds, it is for real. Maybe we don’t know too much about King Abdulaziz Camel Festival taking place right now in Saudi Arabia. It is after all only in its second year. But it is BIG. There are 30,000 camels at the festival and one third of a million visitors.

The festival comprises 2 main events:- the King Abdulaziz Award for Camel Racing, and the King Abdulaziz Award for Camel Beauty.

I know.

The Camel Beautiful

If you are going to take part in something as nuts as a camel beauty pageant, you need your camel to shape up to the ideal of camel beauty. What the judges are looking for –

• the perfect height, shape and placement of the hump
• full, droopy lips
• long eyelashes
• large features
• a big head
• delicate ears
• well-coloured coat

The King Abulaziz Camel Festival in Saudi Arabia attracts the most beautiful and largest camels in the Gulf. This camel, owned by Sultan Al Shammari, is more than three metres tall and has attracted the attention of Guinness World Records. Source: King Abdulaziz Camel Festival

Dirty Tricks

But going back to that screwball title, it contains one significant inaccuracy – the camels are the innocent, injured parties here. It’s not the camels who were caught out “using Botox”. As if. The needle was being wielded by a corrupt Saudi vet at the request of corrupt camel owners. Days before the festival the man was caught red-handed performing plastic surgery on the animals. Ear-reduction surgery to be precise. Yes, we are still talking about camels. Remember what makes for the camel beautiful? ‘Delicate ears’. The same clinic was also found to have treated the 12 unfortunates with the Botox that got them expelled from the beauty pageant. As far as is known, neither the vet nor the camels’ owners were sanctioned. Just the camels.

“They use Botox for the lips, the nose, the upper lips, the lower lips and even the jaw,” says Ali Al Mazrouei, 31, son of a top Emirati breeder. Collagen fillers too. “It makes the head more inflated so when the camel comes it’s like, ‘Oh look at how big is that head is. It has big lips, a big nose’.”

Besides using Botox and collagen, some owners physically pull on the camel’s lips everyday in an attempt to lengthen them. What patient and long-suffering creatures these dromedaries must be.

Other competitors darken their camels’ coats with oil, and fluff them up with a fine comb and lots of hairspray. But as the glamorised contenders are held in a special holding pen the night before the pageant to prevent last minute tampering, the morning mists of the Saudi desert soon put paid to any fancy styling. The idea is that “by the time of the judging, prospective champions will only have their God-given beauty.” Hmm.

Temptation

But why? Why go to such extreme lengths as even Botox and plastic surgery to enhance the camel body beautiful? The answer is not far to seek. As with most human interactions with other animals, so with the camel beauty pageant. The driving force behind every human activity using other animals for human ends is…. Money. In this case lots and lots of it – a pot of gold worth a staggering US$57 million, with the added incentive of raising the sale price of the winning camels by millions more.

With such riches at stake, the temptation to cheat is no surprise. Dirty tricks, as the organisers see it. For the animals, it’s abuse.

At first glance, the idea of a camel beauty pageant seems to us absurd. But if you think about it, it’s no more off the wall than the dog shows held in the West. While with dog shows, the prize money and increased value of breeding stock may be in the thousands rather than the millions, it’s still clearly enough to tempt participants into cheating.

We have dog-doping. We have dogs’ fur dyed, and chalk used to whiten fur that’s not-quite-white-enough. We even have prosthetics to alter the tilt of the ears, and muscles clipped to get the perfect set of the tail. Every dirty trick right down to murder – poor Jagger, a prize-winning red setter fatally poisoned at our own Crufts in 2015.

Dogs here, camels there. When humans sniff money, other animals get abused.

Camels in Demand 

In the Gulf States camels are not wildlife. They are our equivalent of race horses and cows rolled into one. Bloodstock (if they’re racing camels/beauty pageant camels) or livestock, traditionally used for their milk, and increasingly for their meat. The Economist describes the poor creatures as being “speedy and tasty”. Unfortunate attributes to have.

The explosion in demand for camels is creating a huge boom in camel breeding on the other side of the Gulf, in East Africa. In the Sudan, the Rashaidi tribe that migrated from Saudi Arabia in the mid 19th century, are enjoying a new-found affluence raising camels for the Gulf States. Around 200 baby camels are sold each month to Saudi Arabia, and many more to the United Arab Emirates.

Egypt is already a big market for camel sales from East Africa. ‘“Thousands of camels come to Birqesh [in Egypt] each week… trucked in from as far as Sudan and Somalia,” said camel-seller Mohamed Fawzi Fahmi. Most of the camels that survive the sometimes arduous journey to Birqesh will end up meeting the food demands of Cairo’s nine million residents, while the rest can be used for farm work or tourism. Upon their arrival, the animals are sometimes emaciated or have open wounds from being packed into trucks in a long journey that does not necessarily have the best interests of the animals at heart – camels here are a commodity.’ 

Camels for Racing 

The Rashaidi are renowned for breeding some of the world’s fastest racing camels. The camels are trained at dawn and dusk each day, racing around a track in the desert while wealthy visiting Emiratis look on. They are on the lookout for potential champions to enter in the multimillion-dollar races in Dubai, and no doubt in Saudi’s King Abdulaziz Festival Race also.

Where there is animal-racing, be it greyhounds, camels or horses, the animals suffer. They are raced too young, there is selective breeding detrimental to the animal’s health, doping and illegal betting. Criminal activity surrounds these so-called sports.

Those camels, greyhounds and horses that fail to make the grade as racers, and those ‘retired’ from racing are sent to slaughter.

Children and Robots

Just to add another touch of the surreal, since (under pressure from UNICEF) the UAE banned the use of child jockeys in 1993, the camels in training are “whipped along by miniature robots dressed in jockey silks and given orders remotely from white Toyota pickup trucks.” You could not make it up.

There is a deadly side to this though, because the ban is widely ignored. This is a passage from Death in Dubai by Ron Gluckman

ONE OF THE WORLD’S TOP JOCKEYS poses for a photo by the track. His smile says it all. Two front teeth are missing. Raji Shubir [at 6 years old] ranks with the youngest champions of the race course.

The races Raji runs are dangerous brushes with death in the camel pits of Dubai. No riches await young riders like Raji, who are stolen or bought from beggar parents in the slave markets of India, Sri Lanka and Pakistan. And fame is a foolish notion. Fans will never see Raji’s name in magazines, not even if he is trampled to death during a race or murdered afterwards by jealous child jockeys.

But die they do, kicked to death by camels or killed by rival baby riders. Such is the sad, short life in the fast lane for untold slave children shipped to the camel pits of the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Raji, whose name was changed for this article, arrived in Dubai like hundreds of other children from the Asian subcontinent. He was sold by his pauper family to a servant of an Arab lord. Raji slipped through immigration, posing as the child of the Indian servant.

This is typical, according to authorities in India, who smashed several child-selling gangs during the early 1990s. The kids are sold for as little as US$3. Hundreds more are kidnapped, often toddlers as young as two.

UAE immigration and police turn a blind eye to the baby trade that serves the sordid sports of sheiks and sultans of the oil-rich emirates. Even tales of vicious brutality are brushed aside.

A five-year-old rider was beaten to death by other child jockeys last year. But neither he, nor his six-year-old assailants, were mentioned in media or police reports. “This happens often, too often,” says a local reporter, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal.

Seven Asian and African countries, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sudan, Mauritania, Eritrea, Somalia and India were named as the main culprits exporting child camel jockeys to the UAE. Shocking child abuse as well as animal abuse. And underlying it all – money.

Gulf States Sucking up Camels from Across the World

Meanwhile several thousand miles away in South Australia, the future of 300,000 feral camels is starting to look very shaky. The camels which originally arrived in Australia with Afghan and Arab immigrants in the late 1800s, are now being “cultivated” for a local abattoir. 25,000 so far have met their ends this way, chopped up and sent to the Middle East to satisfy the growing demand for camel meat. But the Australian Ngaanyatjarra Camel Company has not been slow to recognise the potential for supplying not only camel meat, but live animals to the Gulf States for the much more lucrative racing and beauty pageant camel breeding industry.

The Botox and Beauty Pageant is No Joke

The “sexy” camels kicked out for using Botox makes for an amusing title, but there is nothing funny about the exploitation of these innocent creatures. If there is a way to exploit them, you can be sure humans have left no stone unturned to find it.

The well-known verse from the Bible is often wrongly quoted as, “Money is the root of all evil.”

The actual quote is, “The love of money is the root of all evil.” The love of money is at the root of all the evils perpetrated on the defenceless, children and nonhuman animals the world over, camels no exception.

Sign petitions

Camels Don’t Need Plastic Surgery – Charge Perpetrators Now!

Protect Camels from Abuse – End Camel Rides at Wilson County Fair

Don’t Force Camels to Give Students Rides for Entertainment

Other actions to take

Visit Joseph’s Amazing Camels Facebook page and leave a comment about their use of these animals for racing and rides here in the UK

Read why you should Ride Bikes, Not Animals and never go on a camel-ride or trekking trip.

Cover photo is a diagram of judging points from the King Abdulaziz Camel Beauty Pageant

¹Title courtesy of Rafi Letzter

Sources

12 Sexy Camels Kicked Out of Beauty Contest for Using Botox

Festival website

Company plans for Gulf exports

East Africa’s booming camel trade

Egyptian animal welfare: Cruel camel markets and kind donkey barbers

Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Crufts

Journalist on how handlers cheat in dog shows

Related posts

The Next Extinction – Donkeys??

6 Good Reasons to Pass Up on Crufts

The Crufts Effect – Dead Puppies Dumped Like Rubbish in a Ditch