Help for the helpless?

During my time researching and writing about animal rights the thing I have possibly realised the most is that it is everyone’s responsibility to ensure animals have rights, and that those rights are not merely hypothetical. Being Vegan it is obvious that I am going to be very, very bias but even I was not accepting the fact that maybe I had a part to play in helping the animals I claim to love so much.
Proclaiming your adoration for your pet dog is not enough.
The suffering that goes on is going on because of us. The consumer. If we did not turn such a blind and selfish eye to what is going it would not go on. People would surely be less inclined to buy meat from a chicken that has spent it’s last days laid in it’s own excretion because it’s body has been pumped so full of growth chemicals that’s it’s legs cannot withstand the weight anymore.
No one wants to know that their bacon butty is the result of torment abuse and agony? It may sound dramatic and pompous but that, my friend, is the reality.

I used to argue that it was an ‘each to their own’ topic – if you like meat why should you deprive yourself? If you can’t afford ‘proper’ meat eat economy and so on. I now feel their is just no excuse for anything.
Whilst doing this blog I have asked everyone I have spoken about it to this question “If you saw the whole process from birth to dinner would you still eat that meat. Every single one of them said no.
That in itself proved everything I had questioned in the beginning I feel.
Everyone knows the reality, it’s just that most people are in denial for an easy life. Trouble is, their making thousands of animal’s lives a misery. Until people’s attitudes change towards accepting the truth and making changes in their own lives, it will always be an uphill struggle for those few who already have.

Free as a bird

It’s easy enough to slap a ‘Free Range’ sticker on a chicken (you might have trouble if it’s not dead) but it seems more animals are found to have living standards a little less green, a little more mean.
Many free range hens are loaded into sheds very similar to those in battery farms, but have a small enclosure that they cant enter via their alloted ‘space’. I can’t help feeling that perhaps when we’re sold free range we don’t expect that to mean ‘free to range a 20 x 20 box’, if I’m being honest.
As for eggs, there are no actual guidelines or checks in place for eggs to be certified ‘Free Range’.

Obviously the main concern is for the animals in question, and secondly for the trusting public who are shelling out more than a few extra quid to feel better about their sunday roast.

Another very worrying factor that could potentially have a backlash on the anti-animal cruelty progress that has been made in the food sector is this; if people are not confident that free range is really free range, then why wouldnt they just go back to eating cheap battery-farmed, mass-produced food?
While I agreed that those behind the free range scams should be brought to justice, is seems it could be a disasterous mistake for angry protesters to bad mouth free range all together as this could all end in carnage that pushes everything back to the caveman days of square one.

Stars of stage and screen

Animal cruelty in the enteratiainment industry has been a well publicised topic for decades.
We’ve all heard the Lassie stories that ruined many a fond childhood memory and shed a tear for the lack of Cruft-fuelled happiness on our TV’s this year but often animals are exploited on television in seemingly harmless situations and for no real purpose.

One prime example of this I discovered whilst flicking through BBC iPlayer. The new show, creatively named ‘My life as an animal’ sees a couple of fame-thirsty and, basically stupid volunteers spend three whole days learning to live as a certain animal. Their aim is to be accepted by the group as an animal themselves.
The only enrichment this programme brought to my life was the sense of huge gratitude to my parents for paying the licence fee, and not me.

The thing that annoyed me more than anything about this was that the ‘volunteers’ genuinely seemed to feel that they had formed an emotional bond with their group, and vica versa.
Now, I’m no horse, clearly, but if we look at this from the horses perspective surely they’re not getting a great deal here.
I mean, first, there’s the equipment, the camera’s, microphones, vehicles and crew disturbing them.
One of the ‘experts’ on the programme said himself that horses are a prey animal. They suspect everyone/thing to be a predator. They even stand sleeping up so that if they come under attack they can flee, sharpish.
So, really, honestly and truely, how on Earth is this programme about loving animals?
As the voice-over lady said, the only way we can see how an animal sees is to take on their world. But that’s basically a massive heap of manure if we’re being frank.
Why on Earth would attempting to sleep standing up, rolling around in poo and eating raw carrots out of a bucket help us connect with a horse?
Horses choose to sleep standing up, they’re not made to. They roll in poo because they WANT to.
This programme is really just beyond belief when you look beyond the comedy factor of watching people you might have seen on the telly once galloping around a field trying to look ‘graceful’.

I really think that things like this should be stopped.
There is no real reason for it to happen, and the animals have no idea what’s going on.
When they act scared, they are scared. They don’t know this freak of nature isn’t going to hurt them.
I think it is sad and naive for those animal experts and specialists to take part in a series like this believing that they are doing everything by the book and ‘loving’ the animals.
Selfishness and greed are what drives human beings, and basic human instincts are what drives animals.
Maybe we could possibly learn something from that…

Sealing the deal?

I’ve recently seen a massive amount of press on the seal slaughter, as the season for the ‘sport’ is upon us (without detracting any seriousness from this post, I’d just like to add that it is impossible not to write that introduction in a non ‘S’-orientated way).

It is reported that over 300,000 seals are killed and slaughtered each year in Canada alone – the main hotspot for the mass slaughter. The seals are bludgeoned over the head or shot, then a hook is inserted into a facial oriphice and dragged away to be skinned – some are even skinned alive.

It is argued that the seal slaughter is neccessary for fishing communities to survive both by keeping the fishes main predator at bay, and for the income that selling the skins of the seals brings.

I find it hard to believe that such a sport is still being allowed to continue in this day and age. It is mindless cruelty and as long as things like this go on, animals are a million miles away from living in harmony as many would like to think we do.

Dog days

It is inevitable that, when researching animal rights, and particularly animal testing, you will come across some horrific things. Often sites such as Peta and WWF and IFAW use disturbing images in their campaingning but when I came across this about a testing lab in America it affected me worse than any picture ever has.

George Billman is an experimenter at a university in America who leads investigations into deaths caused by sudden heart attacks. The laboratory recently came under huge criticism for the high death toll of the animals it experiments on – but shockingly not for it’s testing methods.
Billman experiments on dogs by operating on them to constrict an artery in their hearts to kill a section of the vital muscles tissue, and then “cuffing” another main blood vessel. The dog is then made to run on a treadmill and a heart attack is induced. This is done as many times on each dog as possible, however over 700 have not survived to go a second or third round.
The thing that I found most saddening was that George Billman has been doing this research legally for 28 years and has not yet discovered anything which is valuable to his science.
Instances like this make me think there is very little hope for the future of animal rights if this kind of thing is allowed to continue right under the nose of the – albeit American – government.

How is it possible to argue rights for animals that are purposefully reared to be killed and eaten, or those used for research in fields such as cancer, for example, when animals are being needlessly killed for ‘research’ that has spanned such a vast time period and has gotten nowhere?

NB – Testing on Dogs and Cats is banned in the EU.

Pro-Vivisection put to the test..

So far I have mainly looked at what I believe to be the branch of human-animal contact that I believe to be the easiest to navigate from an animal rights perspective and that is that of animal testing.

It is possibly the most talked about forms of animal cruelty, and one which many people – animal lovers and non, stand united in their views.

I myself find it impossible to think of any just reason why an animal should be tested on, and have done quite an amount of research on the subject in the past, which failed to bring me any closer to accepting animal testing and ‘the lesser of two evils’ as some would argue – not only because I had no desire to, but also because not even the most articulate and knowlegable of scientists or scholars can not rationalise or excuse it enough for me to even consider it a neccessity to research.

The dictionary definition(s) of vivisection can be found here.

Next I will look at a few examples of testing labs that have been exposed and what they were, and probably still are, doing.

Peta

Peta is the largest animal rights organisation in the world, and so it made sense to start there.
I found it comforting to know that they cover 4 main issues of animal cruelty (I had, somewhat surprisingly found out through my previous research, it is nion impossible to look at animal rights as a whole across the animal kingdom).

These four issues are: Farming, Fashion, Entertainment and Laborotory testing.

When looking through the Peta website, and it’s sister wesbite, Peta2, I was filled with a new hope after the previous blogs! They have had so many success stories from protesting, petitioning and campaigning that it restored my faith in humanity, just a little! This seems a strange thing to suggest, when looking at some of the gruesome photographs and videos displayed on the site (they do amazing things for hunger repression), but it shows that people with a conscience can change more than a politician with a gameplan and 289 pages of wordy law stuff.

Many of Peta’s campaigns are over the top and not too friendly on the eye, but it seems this is what is needed to make waves. They have recently been in the news for court action taken against their German campaigning branch, for a campaign that showed farm animals next to Nazi prisoners of war. The advertising campaign was banned in Germany, but many supporters have expressed their anguish at this move.

It seems, when looking back at the archive of Peta’s work, they are doing tremendous things. They have had designers pledging to not use fur on their catwalks, food manufacturers changing their ingredients and cosmetics companies using alternative testing methods, to name but a few.

What is also noticeable, as I mentioned before, is the way in which they conduct these campaigns.
I am completely undecided about this, and so think it deserves further discussion.

On the one hand, I think that the main reason that much of this cruelty is allowed to continue, is because people turn a blind eye to it. I can hold my hands up and say that, even though on a dietary level, I don’t eat anything remotely animal-y, I fail in other areas.
I try to buy cosmetics brands that don’t test on animals, but if someone buys me a makeup set for Christmas do I return it if it doesn’t say ‘Not tested on animals’? No. Do I check all of my toiletries and cleaning products to see if they’re not tested on animals? No. I say I try, but there is always room to try harder. People say they buy Free Range, ‘When they can’ but can’t you always? Is Free Range always what it claims on the tin? I highly doubt it.

Give me one person, besides a butcher or an Arboitoir worker who could see a cow being born, raised, taken to the slaughterhouse, killed, chopped up, cooked and served with chips and still be able to eat it. I don’t think there would be many who could.
It is, I believe, in 9 out of 10 cases a matter of cutting yourself off from what’s on your plate.
So then, what other way is there to get through to people than shock tactics?
If you show them what they are blocking out, what they don’t want to see, then how easy will it be for them to dissociate a cow in a field with a Big Mac?

On the other hand, however, I always try and stick to the ‘each to their own’ stance. It is a massive cop-out sometimes, but I hate it when people try and make me eat meat, so I often feel people should be able also eat what they want. I’ve known a lot of people who have become Vegetarian because they felt they should be, but have been unhappy and ended up wolfing down an entire bargain bucket on a night out after two months of lentils and brocolli.
Fair enough there are a lot of alternatives out there, but no one can deny that they are far more expensive than a cheap, meat alternative.

The change needs to start higher up, to have an effect on those ‘below’.
If factory farming was stopped, the demand for meat would rise, the price would go up, less people would be able to afford it and would then maybe choose a Vegetarian diet, with farming cruelty, for example. Obviously nothing is as simple as that, but as long as there is a demand for cheap meat, there is going to be factory farming. Rules have been put in place time and time again, but people find ways around them.

I’ve gone slightly off the point and onto my high horse here, but;

Basically, what the world needs is a big, fat, dose of conscience. Amen.

Wrong, right?

It seems I have only gone one step in the direction of shedding a negative light on animal rights by looking at the mechanical, emotionless side of things – not in a way in which I think animals should not have any rights, but in a way that I can see no logical way to give animal rights. On a worldwide scale, if not one creature has the right to live, then how has it the right to anything beneath that? It is all well and good to suggest, as many of our free range or whatever-else products do, that an animal is given a good life, but what is the point in that? If you can eat a piece of meat and not feel guilty (I’m not suggesting you should have to) then what does anyone care whether the animal on your dinner plate was able to roam in fields of green or not?
In the same vein, if animal rights cannot be given to animals in their lifespan, should they be entitled to a ‘humane’ death? It is said that pigs are more intelligent than dogs, and know that they’re not being piled into the back of a van to go on a field trip when the time comes, so even if the pig goes from living to dead in 0.00000000001 seconds, the amount of distress it’s been in could have lasted hours. Again, however, if each little piggy was cheuffer-driven to a hut labelled ‘mud-spa’ and knew nothing until it had a bullet/axe/needle in the back of it’s head, then surely in it’s life-time it should be given rights, too?
Where can it ever begin when each direction leads to impossibilities?

I feel somewhat as though I am letting the side down here, but I did not set out to preach, and I think the comments I have made and the questions I have raised are perfectly valid at this point, as I still have a lot to learn.

Next, I am going to look at charities that campaign for animal rights. I hope by seeing what they campaign for, and their arguments against animal cruelty, and also the campaigns they have already won, I will be able to bring some of this confusion to a sensible mid-point at the very least.

Babe Vs Bacon

“You put a baby in a crib with an apple and a rabbit. If it eats the rabbit and plays with the apple, I’ll buy you a new car”.
~ Harvey Diamond

How can differences in cultural and social beliefs affect animal rights?

I came across a Turkish takeaway in central London not so long ago, and on the list of dishes displayed in the wshop window was ‘Cobra’. I was absolutely repulsed by this, and so was everyone else who I told, but the shop would not have been advertising the meat if they didn’t think people wanted to buy it.

In my opinion, this is possibly the pivotal factor in the debate on animal rights that divides the masses and thus skews all foundations of animal rights themselves.

In the UK horses are, for the most part, seen as creatures of entertainment, whether it be riding, show-jumping or racing, but in France and Italy it is commonplace to order horsemeat from a restaurant or buy it from a shop. In th UK – vegetarian or not – the idea of eating horsemeat would probably be enough to send people running for the Tofu.
Similarly, in the UK a cow is more often associated with ketchup gherkin and fries-to-go, but in most parts of India the cow is sacred (the reasons for and arguments against this are a different story entirely).

The same can be said for what animals are kept as pets, and which are ferril..the list goes on.

On the other hand, it can be argued that some countries have barely any human rights, let alone animal rights, but in Britain alone, there are so many social differences that bring dispute to the table; the other massive issue that I have come across when researching this topic is class.
No matter how many state school kids Cambridge and Oxford allow though their pearly gates, the class system in Britain is never going to be dead, and we all know that.

From fashion to food the worlds of wealthy Britains and those not-so can be miles apart.
Venison and Veal, Pheasant and Rabbit are all food associated with those who live a life of luxury, but I challenge anyone to find a council estate cafe that could serve and sell that kind of meat, no matter what the dressings or price-tag.

The same goes for views on fur coats, snakeskin boots and crocodile handbags – accepted in the wealthier circles, despised in those poorer.

If from one country, region or even postcode to the next as is probable in many areas, ideas about animals (I use the term in the broadest sense, here) can be so varied, how on Earth has anyone the right to dish out laws about animal rights?

This point is one which I hate to have to think about myself, and one that goes against everything I’d like to think is good and moral and right.
It is easy to say all animals should be treated fairly, but that’s impossible. Is it then alright to suggest that pets be given better protection than animals in danger of being hunted?
If a species is so endangered that you can be imprisoned for killing it, would it be right or wrong to kill an animal that could pose a threat to one of these endangered creatures?
The subject is so vast and yet every tiny detail counts, yet each one brings another into dispute.

Born to be wild?

“Hunting is
not a sport.
In a sport,
both sides
should know
they’re in the game.
~Paul Rodriguez”

Should wildlife have the same rights as animals in captivity?

Okay, so we’re all aware of the Golden Do’s and Don’t of wildlife TLC:
Don’t use blue toilet paper unless you want to bring a new meaning to the words “aqua-marine-creatures”,
Do Squash tin cans to avoid unwanted kitty head-wear, don’t dump toxic waste into rivers… you know the drill – but where do we stand on wildlife animal rights for wildlife?

As with the issues surrounding ‘general’ animal rights, there seems to be an unmistakeable stench of double standards in the air amongst the un-bias public.

Take the hunting ban of 2005, for example. This law would, by name, suggest a ban on hunting, right? Apparently not. What it did ban was the use of dogs to kill foxes, and the use of more than two dogs to ‘flush out’ said foxes so that they could then be shot or, if the jodpur-sporting darlings were feeling particularly daring, killed by a bird of prey. Ahh. Right. Glad we cleared that one up then.

How is it possible for some birds to be so endangered that you can be fined or imprisoned for killing them, yet it is perfectly legal for those same birds to be shot in a specific hunting season?

It seems that even in specific sectors of animal rights, the rules are neither her nor there.