*Mahatma Gandhi
No animal should be forced to endure harsh Canadian winters, yet everywhere you look there's a stray cats trying to find a warm place to sleep and dogs whose owners have them chained outside all day long. When it's -7 and blowing 35 miles an hour they are out there, some whimpering fultily and wishing that they could come inside.
Don't allow your cat to roam freely outdoors. During winter, cats sometimes climb up under the hoods of cars to be near warm engines and are killed or badly injured when the car is started. Cats can become confused when there is snow or ice on the ground and lose their scent so they can't find their way back home. More cats are lost during the winter than during any other season.Provide dogs with proper shelter. Doghouses should be made of wood or plastic. Raise the house off the ground several inches and put a flap over the door to keep out cold drafts. Use straw for bedding—rugs, blankets can get wet and freeze.
Please keep an eye out for stray cats or dogs and bring them inside until you can find their owner. If you can't find out who owns them then bring them to your local animal shelter so they can be given a chance to find a warm loving home. Also report owners who leave their dogs outside in the cold with no shelter to the humane society in your area. If the dog looks like it's been badly abused (other than the fact that their own leaves them outside to freeze) try to take pictures of any marks of physical abuse or neglect, write down dates and times between when the dog gets food or water and if the dog looks really hungry give it something to eat. Animals can't speak for themselves. If we don't stand up for them, who will?
What do you think when you see your favorite actor or musical artist wearing a fur coat? Do you wonder what animal suffered behind all this? First of all, let me tell you that it takes at least 100 chinchillas, 100 squirrels, 62 minks, 40 sables, 30 rabbits, 27 raccoons, 18 red foxes, 13 lynxes, or 100 beavers just to make one coat of fur.
I have always held this opinion and it will never change: there's just no excuse for wearing fur.How can anyone justify wearing fur when there are so many other materials that are warmer, lighter and cheaper? Why should dozens of lives be taken just so one person can have one "fashionable" coat?
If someone owned an animal and they kept it in a tiny cage and hardly ever fed it or gave it water they would have that animal taken away. So how do people who work in the fur industry do that and so much worse and get away with it? Does this not bother anyone else but me? Fur "farms" are not what supporters make them out to be. They are more like fur factories. Animals are put in tiny cages barely big enough for them and sometimes they have to share them with two or three other animals. Conditions of these places are beyond unfit. Most animals used for fur are killed by anal or vaginal electrocution so as not to damage their fur. This method of execution is undeniably cruel and sometimes has to be done 2 or 3 times before the animal finally dies. Is fashion really a justification for putting an animal through that kind of suffering?
Trapping isn't so pleasant either.Despite what trappers would have you believe, animals frequently sustain severe injuries from being trapped. When not killed outright by the trap, animals can suffer physiological trauma, dehydration, exposure to severe weather, and predation by other animals until the trapper returns. When the trapper returns he usually clubs, suffocates or strangles the animal to death. Fur trappers rarely shoot trapped animals because bullet holes and blood reduce a pelt's value.
Traps set in or near water are designed to drown aquatic mammals, which can take up to 20 minutes for some species.1 The American Veterinary Medical Association deems drowning to be inhumane and a 1999 study concluded "drowning cannot be considered euthanasia."2
Most traps are notoriously indiscriminate, capturing almost any animal that triggers them. Sometimes called "trash" animals by trappers, non-target species that have been found in traps include threatened and endangered species, raptors, domestic dogs and cats, and even humans. These animals can sustain the same injuries as target species. Even if released, they may perish later from internal injuries or reduced ability to hunt or forage for food.
Experimenting on animals is an extremely unreliable, ineffective, and inefficient approach to curing human diseases. Research on animals is predicated on the assumption that the data gathered from animals will be predictive of human results. In other words, it assumes that humans will respond to a procedure or drug in a real-life setting similarly to the way that animals in laboratories respond to the same procedure or drug. This has proven, time over time, to simply not be the case. For example, whereas penicillin is one of the most useful prescription drugs among humans, the drug kills guinea pigs and hamsters and has no effect at all on rabbits. Had Alexander Fleming—the scientist credited with the discovery of penicillin—conducted research on guinea pigs or hamsters, their misleading results would likely have kept the invaluable drug from humans. Examples like this abound. Billions of dollars are wasted and millions of animals are tortured when animals are infected with HIV, cancer, or other diseases and are then discovered not to respond to the disease or the proposed cure in the same way that humans do.
Arsenic, which is toxic and carcinogenic to humans, has not caused cancer in other species. Chlomiphene decreases fertility in animals but induces human ovulation. The anti-inflammatory drug phenylbutazone breaks down nine times faster in humans than in rhesus monkeys.
Diethylstilbestrol (DES), an animal-tested drug that prevents miscarriages, caused cancer and birth defects in humans before its use was restricted. Many arthritis drugs that passed animal tests, including Feldene, and Flosint, have been pulled from the market because they caused severe reactions or even death in human beings.
Practolol, a drug for heart disorders that "passed" animal tests, causes blindness in humans and was pulled off the market.
"So if all this is true then why does vivisection even exist?" you might be thinking.
There are, in fact, only two categories of doctors and scientists who are not opposed to vivisection: those who don’t know enough about it, and those who make money from it.”
As for the scientists “who don’t know enough about it,” senior researchers trained only in vivisection usually emphasize it to the exclusion of other methods. Out of habit and self-justification, they initiate students into the belief system of vivisection, requiring them to conduct dissection and vivisection to graduate. Students indoctrinated into the system then, as senior researchers themselves, pass the same outdated focus on animal research to their students, having perhaps never asked the question of whether their research is truly relevant to curing human disease. Many scientists spend all their time in laboratories experimenting on animals and are not involved in establishing the practical application of their data to humans. Many others researchers may have privately questioned or doubted the value of animal research but have either not felt comfortable speaking out against it or not wanted to risk career, money, and prestige by doing so.
Regarding “those who make money from it,” animal research tends to be extremely profitable for those who conduct it. For a number of reasons, it tends to be much easier to publish animal research in academic journals than to publish clinical (human) studies. Animals have shorter life spans (meaning future generations of animals can be observed in a much shorter time than with humans), so birth-defect studies are easier and quicker—not reliable or scientifically valid, but easier and quicker. The large number of academic journals looking for articles promotes the cycle of “publish or perish.” Researchers will often perform the same procedures on different species of animals to make for easy publication. Unfortunately, the validity and relevance to medical and scientific progress is sacrificed along the way.
The publication of articles in academic journals starts a whole wave of events. As articles are published, universities gain more publicity and prestige, resulting in research grants from the NIH and other sources, which provides millions of dollars to the universities, which can then conduct more research to get lucrative products on the market quicker and make more people more money.
History has proven that industries tend to shy away from admitting to anything that might harm their business, as exemplified by tobacco executives, who—in the face of overwhelming evidence—spent years denying that cigarette smoking is bad for human health. Animal research is a billion-dollar industry. That money pays the salaries of thousands of scientists and influences their behavior and thinking. This works on both a micro scale with individual researchers and on a macro scale with giant companies, and unfortunately dictates that money rather than human health, to say nothing of the welfare of animals, is typically the motivating factor.
There are approximately 300 million egg laying hens in the U.S. confined in battery cages — small wire cages stacked in tiers and lined up in rows inside huge warehouses. In accordance with the USDA's recommendation to give each hen four inches of 'feeder space,' hens are commonly packed four to a cage measuring just 16 inches wide. In this tiny space, the birds cannot stretch their wings or legs, and they cannot fulfill normal behavioral patterns or social needs. Constantly rubbing against the wire cages, they suffer from severe feather loss, and their bodies are covered with bruises and abrasions.
In order to reduce injuries resulting from excessive pecking — an aberrant behavior that occurs when the confined hens are bored and frustrated — practically all laying hens have part of their beaks cut off. Debeaking is a painful procedure that involves cutting through bone, cartilage, and soft tissue.
After one year in egg production, the birds are classified as 'spent hens' and are sent off to slaughter. Their brittle, calcium-depleted bones often shatter during handling or at the slaughterhouse. They usually end up in soups, pot pies, or similar low-grade chicken meat products in which their bodies can be shredded to hide the bruises from consumers.
In some cases, especially if the cost of replacement hens is high, laying hens may be 'force molted' to extend their laying capacity. This process involves starving the hens for up to 18 days, keeping them in the dark, and denying them water to shock their bodies into another egg-laying cycle. Commonly, between 5 and 10% of birds die during the molt, and those who live may lose more than 25% of their body weight.
For every egg-laying hen confined in a battery cage, there is a male chick who was killed at the hatchery. Because egg-laying chicken breeds have been genetically selected exclusively for maximum egg production, they don't grow fast or large enough to be raised profitably for meat. Therefore, male chicks of egg-laying breeds are of no economic value, and they are literally discarded on the day they hatch — usually by the cheapest, most convenient means available. Thrown into trash cans by the thousands, male chicks suffocate or are crushed under the weight of others.
Another common method of disposing of unwanted male chicks is grinding them up alive. This can result in unspeakable horrors, as described by one research scientist who observed that "even after twenty seconds, there were only partly damaged animals with whole skulls". In other words, fully conscious chicks were partially ground up and left to slowly and agonizingly die. Eyewitness accounts at commercial hatcheries indicate similar horrors of chicks being slowly dismembered by machinery blades en route to trash bins or manure spreaders.
With corporate hog factories replacing traditional hog farms, pigs raised for food are being treated more as inanimate tools of production than as living, feeling animals.
Approximately 100 million pigs are raised and slaughtered in the U.S. every year. As babies, they are subjected to painful mutilations without anesthesia or pain relievers. Their tails are cut off to minimize tail biting, an aberrant behavior that occurs when these highly-intelligent animals are kept in deprived factory farm environments. In addition, notches are taken out of the piglets' ears for identification.
By two to three weeks of age, 15% of the piglets will have died. Those who survive are taken away from their mothers and crowded into pens with metal bars and concrete floors. A headline from National Hog Farmer magazine advises, "Crowding Pigs Pays...", and this is exemplified by the intense overcrowding in every stage of hog confinement systems. Pigs will live this way, packed into giant, warehouse-like sheds, until they reach a slaughter weight of 250 pounds at 6 months old.
Modern breeding sows are treated like piglet-making machines. Living a continuous cycle of impregnation and birth, each sow has more than 20 piglets per year. After being impregnated, the sows are confined in gestation crates — small metal pens just two feet wide that prevent sows from turning around or even lying down comfortably. At the end of their four-month pregnancies, they are transferred to similarly cramped farrowing crates to give birth. With barely enough room to stand up and lie down and no straw or other type of bedding to speak of, many suffer from sores on their shoulders and knees. When asked about this, one pork industry representative wrote, "...straw is very expensive and there certainly would not be a supply of straw in the country to supply all the farrowing pens in the U.S."
Numerous research studies conducted over the last 25 years have pointed to physical and psychological maladies experienced by sows in confinement. The unnatural flooring and lack of exercise causes obesity and crippling leg disorders, while the deprived environment produces neurotic coping behaviors such as repetitive bar biting and sham chewing (chewing nothing).
After the sows give birth and nurse their young for two to three weeks, the piglets are taken away to be fattened, and the sows are re-impregnated. An article in Successful Farming explains, "Any sow that is not gestating, lactating or within seven days post weaning is non-active," and hog factories strive to keep their sows '100 % active' in order to maximize profits. When the sow is no longer deemed a productive breeder, she is sent to slaughter. Prior to being hung upside down by their back legs and bled to death at the slaughterhouse, pigs are supposed to be 'stunned' and rendered unconscious, in accordance with the federal Humane Slaughter Act. However, stunning at slaughterhouses is terribly imprecise, and often conscious animals are hung upside down, kicking and struggling, while a slaughterhouse worker tries to 'stick' them in the neck with a knife. If the worker is unsuccessful, the pig will be carried to the next station on the slaughterhouse assembly line — the scalding tank — where he/she will be boiled, alive and fully conscious.
Since the 1980s a series of mergers and acquisitions has resulted in concentrating over 80% of the 35 million beef cattle slaughtered annually in the U.S. into the hands of four huge corporations.
Accustomed to roaming unimpeded and unconstrained, range cattle are frightened and confused when humans come to round them up. Terrified animals are often injured, some so severely that they become "downed" (unable to walk or even stand). These downed animals commonly suffer for days without receiving food, water or veterinary care, and many die of neglect. Others are dragged, beaten, and pushed with tractors on their way to slaughter.
Many cattle will experience additional transportation and handling stress at stockyards and auctions, where they are goaded through a series of walkways and holding pens and sold to the highest bidder. From the auction, older cattle may be taken directly to slaughter, or they may be taken to a feedlot.
Ranchers still identify cattle the same way they have since pioneer days — with hot iron brands. Needless to say, this practice is extremely traumatic and painful, and the animals bellow loudly as ranchers' brands are burned into their skin. Beef cattle are also subjected to 'waddling,' another type of identification marking. This painful procedure entails cutting chunks out of the hide that hangs under the animals' necks. Waddling marks are supposed to be large enough so that ranchers can identify their cattle from a distance.
Most beef cattle spend the last few months of their lives at feedlots, crowded by the thousands into dusty, manure-laden holding pens. The air is thick with harmful bacteria and particulate matter, and the animals are at a constant risk for respiratory disease. Feedlot cattle are routinely implanted with growth-promoting hormones, and they are fed unnaturally rich diets designed to fatten them quickly and profitably. Because cattle are biologically suited to eat a grass-based, high fiber diet, their concentrated feedlot rations contribute to metabolic disorders.
Cattle may be transported several times during their lifetimes, and they may travel hundreds or even thousands of miles during a single trip. Long journeys are very stressful and contribute to disease and even death. The Drover's Journal reports, "Shipping fever costs livestock producers as much as $1 billion a year."
Young cattle are commonly taken to areas with cheap grazing land, to take advantage of this inexpensive feed source. Upon reaching maturity, they are trucked to a feedlot to be fattened and readied for slaughter. Eventually, all of them will end up at the slaughterhouse.
A standard beef slaughterhouse kills 250 cattle every hour. The high speed of the assembly line makes it increasingly difficult to treat animals with any semblance of humaneness. Prior to being hung up by their back legs and bled to death, cattle are supposed to be rendered unconscious, as stipulated by the federal Humane Slaughter Act. This 'stunning' is usually done by a mechanical blow to the head. However, the procedure is terribly imprecise, and inadequate stunning is inevitable. As a result, conscious animals are often hung upside down, kicking and struggling, while a slaughterhouse worker makes another attempt to render them unconscious. Eventually, the animals will be "stuck" in the throat with a knife, and blood will gush from their bodies whether or not they are unconscious.
Specials thanks to contributing sites:
www.factoryfarming.com
www.animalsvoice.com
www.idausa.org
for pictures and information
