It seems the World is short of compassion...

Imagine travelling in a vehicle crammed so full with other passengers that you have no space to sit down – OK, underground transit systems in rush hour tick that box. 

But then imagine that the journey is 18 hours long, over hundreds of miles, perhaps involving a sea crossing which could be bumpy and uncomfortable. It is stifling hot outside and within the vehicle and you are given no comfort stops, for loos and refreshments.

Then imagine that we are talking about sheep, or cattle. The stench within the soiled truck can be overwhelming, the pitiful bleating heartrending. By the end of the journey there are up to a hundred or more sickly, exhausted, and stressed animals, that may even on arrival at their destination be unloaded into overcrowded “fattening barns”, devoid of sunlight and green pastures, perhaps for up to a month or so before being taken for slaughter.

What a fate. No animal should be allowed to suffer like this.

Farm animals can experience pain and distress just like us, and they can also know contentment and well-being.

According to the website of Compassion in World Farming, over 40 billion animals worldwide are confined in factory farming systems which prevent them from doing what animals do naturally. How cruel is that?

If we insist on eating animals we really do owe it to them that they do not have to suffer so much in their lives. 

But this is what happens all the time when animals are forced to travel may miles before slaughter. In the UK live exports are a particular horror that is currently being addressed by Compassion in World Farming.  

It may seem almost irrelevant to be worried about animal suffering when we cannot even deal adequately with the immense suffering of fellow human beings, innocent children in Syria for example.

But both matter. A truly compassionate heart doesn’t differentiate – a compassionate heart must hold a deep concern for all sentient beings, human or otherwise.

It seems we are very short of compassion in our world.

For more information you can go to the websites of Compassion in World Farming and The Humane Society of the United States.

Please care about our animals. Please consider supporting organic farming if you must eat meat. Please consider eating less meat, even going vegetarian. Please find compassion in your heart for these creatures that do not have a voice, other than a pitiful bleat or bellow when life is not treating them well.

Compassion and Empathy part 2

I wrote recently of the need to infuse our lives with compassion and empathy, for a better world. But compassion must not stop with humans. Don't forget the animals!

I am reminded forcefully of this from seeing the latest horrors from Compassion in World Farming  who have a dreadful report on the cruelty pigs are subjected to in Italy  -  don't look if you will be upset by images of pigs that are left in appalling conditions waiting to die, maybe many days or weeks later.

1 in every 30 Americans, that is 10 million people, back the Humane Society of the United States,  an organization that seeks a humane and sustainable world for all animals and is America’s ‘mainstream force against cruelty, exploitation and neglect.’ This means that 29 out of every 30 or 290 million Americans may not care very much about animal cruelty. That is a huge number of people. Many farm animals are subjected to the most appallingly cruel conditions in factory farms. Would those who love their own family pets be happy for them to be treated to the same kind of cruelty? 

By our inactions we appear to condone miserable birthing cages or farrowing crates for female pigs, where they are held for months and can hardly move let alone turn around or socialize with other pigs; we eat and apparently enjoy the French delicacy pate de foie gras which requires that ducks and geese are force-fed unnaturally large quantities of food through a metal tube that is shoved down their throats and into their stomachs two or three times each day. This barbaric treatment produces a liver that is fatty, diseased and ten times the normal size. It sounds disgusting and it is; goodness knows how those birds must suffer. We prefer not to know about the calves separated from their mothers within the first few days of birth and crammed into individual crates or stalls, tethered by their necks, so they can hardly move, for the duration of their dreadful short lives; and we ignore the plight of the 280 million laying hens in the United States which spend their lives cooped up in tiny cages with no more than the space of an A4 piece of paper that they can (hardly) call their own. 

I'm sorry if you find this shocking. If you don't find it shocking then I am sorry for you - and for the fate of animals that touch your lives in any way.

Let's all make a difference. Let's all help to put an end to suffering - of humans and animals - let's cultivate empathy and compassion in all that we do!!

Happy Day for Hens!

As Aldous Huxley once said,
“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”

“1 in every 30 Americans, that is 10 million people, back the Humane Society of the United States, an organization that seeks a humane and sustainable world for all animals and is America’s ‘mainstream force against cruelty, exploitation and neglect.’ This means that 29 out of every 30 or 290 million Americans may not care very much about animal cruelty. That is a huge number of people.
I wrote that a couple of years ago and the really good news is that another million now back the society, that is now 1 in 28 Americans!
But the fact remains that many farm animals are still subjected to the most appallingly cruel conditions in factory farms. Would those who love their own family pets be happy for them to be treated to the same kind of cruelty? By our inactions we appear to condone miserable birthing cages or farrowing crates for female pigs, where they are held for months and can hardly move let alone turn around or socialize with other pigs; we eat and apparently enjoy the French delicacy pate de foie gras which requires that ducks and geese are force-fed unnaturally large quantities of food through a metal tube that is shoved down their throats and into their stomachs two or three times each day. This barbaric treatment produces a liver that is fatty, diseased and ten times the normal size. It sounds disgusting and it is; goodness knows how those birds must suffer. We prefer not to know about the calves separated from their mothers within the first few days of birth and crammed into individual crates or stalls, tethered by their necks, so they can hardly move, for the duration of their dreadful short lives; and we ignore the plight of the 280 million laying hens in the United States which spend their lives cooped up in tiny cages with no more than the space of an A4 piece of paper that they can (hardly) call their own.”

However not all is gloom and doom. Compassion in World Farming is celebrating a landmark piece of EU animal welfare legislation that came into force today, making the use of barren battery cages for egg-laying hens illegal throughout the European Union (EU).
There's a short and pretty silly film of hens celebrating as well!
But, and this is why we cannot be complacent, 13 EU states are likely to be non-compliant, with 84 million hens still stuck in those dreadful cages. And these eggs may still be imported and sold in the UK, or used in the manufacture of other foods offered for sale. So those of us who care about animals and their welfare must remain vigilant. Our work is not over yet.

You can go to the CWF “The Big Move” website to ask the European Commission not to let non-compliant nations get away with flouting the ban. And we can all be more thoughtful about what we are buying and eating. Please think about this, for the sake of sentient animals everywhere.

And a Very Happy New Year to all my readers.

A Call for empathy with all farm animals

A couple of days ago I wrote about the dangers of remoteness – how if we saw the results of our actions we may think twice about some of our behavior.

I may have said this before – forgive me if so, but it is such an important topic, it bears repeating. And some readers of my blog are just passing through for the day, so to speak, so will have missed previous posts on this.
1 in every 30 Americans, that is 10 million people, back the Humane Society of the United States, an organization that seeks a humane and sustainable world for all animals and is America’s ‘mainstream force against cruelty, exploitation and neglect.’ This means that 29 out of every 30 or 290 million Americans may not care very much about animal cruelty. That is a huge number of people. OK I appreciate that many will not be able to afford belonging to every cause that takes their fancy. But that doesn’t mean we have to ignore the plight of farm animals. We can vote with how we spend our money on meat. Many farm animals are subjected to the most appallingly cruel conditions in factory farms. Would those who love their own family pets be happy for them to be treated to the same kind of cruelty? By our inactions we appear to condone miserable birthing cages or farrowing crates for female pigs, where they are held for months and can hardly move let alone turn around or socialize with other pigs; we eat and apparently enjoy the French delicacy pate de foie gras which requires that ducks and geese are force-fed unnaturally large quantities of food through a metal tube that is shoved down their throats and into their stomachs two or three times each day. This barbaric treatment produces a liver that is fatty, diseased and ten times the normal size. It sounds disgusting and it is; goodness knows how those birds must suffer. We prefer not to know about the calves separated from their mothers within the first few days of birth and crammed into individual crates or stalls, tethered by their necks, so they can hardly move, for the duration of their dreadful short lives; and we ignore the plight of the 280 million laying hens in the United States which spend their lives cooped up in tiny cages with no more than the space of an A4 piece of paper that they can (hardly) call their own.
This is not only about cruelty to animals, although that is reason enough to do something to stop these dreadful practices. Organic humanely reared food is better for our health, and usually tastes a whole lot better as well. We could all pledge to eat quality not quantity, cut back on portion sizes but really savour the taste of what we eat. These factory farms are pushing the small family farmers, on farms that have practiced small-scale humane husbandry sometimes through generations, to the brink of bankruptcy. It is said that every new factory farm forces 10 family farmers out of business. With every small family farmer that has to leave the farm, communities lose access to fresh, healthy food and local economies are weakened. And a sustainable environment is threatened with abnormal pollution patterns and disease.

So let’s try to think a little more about the effects of what we do, how we behave, as we go about our daily living. Let's use our imagination and help stop animal cruelty.

Hugh's Fish Fight

In the UK we have the taste for salmon and we eat vast quantities of it. I would guess this goes back to a few years ago when we were told that oily fish is an essential part of a healthy diet. Also we don’t like bones in our fish, and salmon is quite bone free in fillet form. Now it seems that we as consumers cannot get enough salmon. So much so that to satisfy the demand at a price we are prepared to pay in the supermarkets and fishmongers, massive fish farms have been built in the lochs of Scotland.

This week I’ve watched Hugh Fearnley-Whittingshall campaigning on TV – Hugh’s Fish Fight, on Channel 4, all week. Last year he campaigned, along with Jamie Oliver, for the welfare of chickens, and as a result the industry had to make many changes – indeed is still doing so, all for the well being of chickens. This year his cause is fish sustainability. After seeing the episode on Thursday about the said fish farms I really am glad I’m a vegetarian. But I still buy salmon for the family, and I will definitely look more carefully at what I buy in future.

Fact number one: 3 tons of small wild oily fish such as anchovies are caught on the other side of the world, made into fish pellets and brought here where they are fed to our farm salmons. That is bad enough – but it gets much worse. Three tons of these small fish produce just 1 ton of the farmed salmon that ends up on our plates. How sustainable is that?

Fact number 2: The pellets are fed continuously to the fish through tubes into the tanks – and the fish certainly don’t have much room to swim around in. As a result of the overcrowding the fish get lice. Chemicals are used in the water to control the lice, but the lice also infect and kill the wild fish in the surrounding waters of the loch.

Fact number 3: Pink dyes are used in the feed to make the flesh an “acceptable” pink colour – to make the pieces of fish look more attractive to us as consumers!

Fact number 4: When the fish are big enough to “harvest” the process is absolutely horrible to watch, (although it is clearly more humane than the treatment of fish suffocated to death in nets at sea – see my recent blog on this). The fish are “hoovered” up through a big tube placed in the tank, travel through the pipe into the slaughtering and processing shed, where men are ready to guide them splashing and struggling into large sharp arrangements of knives which kill the fish before they move along the line for further processing and packing. The men who do this wear lots of waterproof protective clothing but were well bloodied by the procedure – in fact there was blood everywhere. It was a very bloody business and I found it deeply disturbing. I forget the volume of carnage per hour, 8 hours a day – but it was on a horrendous scale.

Quite apart from the question of whether and how much fish suffer, there are two further issues here. Firstly, the process for organic farmed salmon is much more environmentally sustainable and the product that reaches our plate is likely to be a healthier option, free from chemicals with unknown long term effects. Organic farmed salmon are fed on pellets made from locally sourced fish scraps – offcuts and trimmings they are called, wastage from other fish processed elsewhere and that would otherwise be thrown away. But organic salmon represents less than 5% of the total farmed salmon we eat. If we have to eat so much salmon, let’s at least go organic.

But the second issue is this. It seems we are very conservative in the fish we eat – it’s basically and almost exclusively cod, salmon or tuna. Cod stocks are dangerously low. Tuna fishing is often far from sustainable and depending on the method used can threaten other species in the sea such as dolphins and turtles. And salmon farming – well the facts are as given. So why not try all the other wonderful fish that are freely available in our seas, and give non-organic salmon, tuna and cod a break.

I could write so much more on all of this and probably will in later blogs, but do visit Hugh’s website from where you can link to the Fish Fight pages.

Now I know this story is from the UK. But in the United States 1 in every 30 Americans, that is 10 million people, back the Humane Society of the United States, an organization that seeks a humane and sustainable world for all animals and is America’s ‘mainstream force against cruelty, exploitation and neglect.’ This means that 29 out of every 30 or 290 million Americans may not care very much about animal cruelty. That is a huge number of people. Perhaps Americans need a clone of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingshall!

I also know the pictures are not of salmon! They are of the fish market in Funchal, Madeira.

Animal Welfare

People use the expression “out of sight, out of mind," to mean that something is easily forgotten or dismissed as soon as it is beyond our range of vision. It can be used in everyday conversation for quite trivial incidents. The problem is that whether we realize it or not, we often live our lives by the same principle, and some incidents may be far from trivial.
“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored,” said Aldous Huxley.
1 in every 30 Americans, that is 10 million people, back the Humane Society of the United States, an organization that seeks a humane and sustainable world for all animals and is America's “mainstream force against cruelty, exploitation and neglect.” That is all to the well and good, but this means that 29 out of every 30 or 290 million Americans may not care very much about animal cruelty. That is a huge number of people. Many farm animals are subjected to the most appalling cruel conditions in factory farms. Would those who love their own family pets be happy for them to be treated to the same kind of cruelty? By our inactions we appear to condone miserable birthing cages or farrowing crates for female pigs, where they are held for months and can hardly move let alone turn around or socialize with other pigs; we eat and apparently enjoy the French delicacy pate de foie gras which requires that ducks and geese are force-fed unnaturally large quantities of food through a metal tube that is shoved down their throats and into their stomachs two or three times each day. This barbaric treatment produces a liver that is fatty, diseased and ten times the normal size. It sounds disgusting and it is; goodness knows how those birds must suffer. We prefer not to know about the calves separated from their mothers within the first few days of birth and crammed into individual crates or stalls, tethered by their necks, so they can hardly move, for the duration of their dreadful short lives; and we ignore the plight of the 280 million laying hens in the United States which spend their lives cooped up in tiny cages with no more than the space of an A4 piece of paper that they can (hardly) call their own.
This is not only about cruelty to animals, although that is reason enough to do something to stop these dreadful practices. Organic humanely reared food is better for our health, and usually tastes a whole lot better as well. These factory farms are pushing family farms, farms that have practiced small-scale humane husbandry sometimes through generations, to the brink of bankruptcy. “Every new factory farm forces 10 family farmers out of business. With every small family farmer that has to leave the farm, communities lose access to fresh, healthy food and local economies are weakened.”And a sustainable environment is threatened with abnormal pollution patterns and disease.
It is true that very many organizations have signed up to a commitment to use only humane farm produce and through the efforts of organizations like the Humane Society the numbers increase daily. But America’s record on animal welfare does not compare well with that in Europe, where the entire European Union has already banned both veal crates and gestation crates, effective 2007 and 2013, respectively. As I write, in the United States the use of these abusive crates remains customary practice.

But here in the UK we are no saints in this regard. Those of us who care about the welfare of animals are currently hugely disturbed about plans for a mega dairy farm in Norfolk, where unless we do something to stop it, 8000 cows will be kept almost entirely indoors for their whole lives. As a dairy farmer's daughter, I watched every year the sheer unadulterated joy of the cows let out onto the new pastures each and every spring. They would run around, kicking their back legs in the air, sometimes even rolling in the grass, before getting down to serious grazing. And cows are meant to graze. Their stomachs are not designed to eat processed foods from buckets and troughs. And cows bred to produce unnatural milk yields often suffer appalling lameness, brought on by the massive and heavy udders, which themselves are prone to mastitis, a nasty inflammation of the udders which must be hugely uncomfortable for them. I could go on - but if I can only raise awareness so that you can read the facts for yourself, and reassess your own contribution to the welfare of animals, then I shall feel I have achieved something.

The animals in these photos are not of course cows, but alpacas, enjoying an English summer pasture. Will the day come when delightful beasts will be factory farmed for greater profit? I do sincerely hope not.