Happy Thanksgiving

Here's an idea. Be thankful and compassionate. Have TOFURKY for Thanksgiving.




We're in Texas. It's great to be back in the US. We didn't have a problem crossing the border. It took about a half an hour so we arrived by noon. We're staying in McAllen for the night. The jeep needs an oil change. We will leave in the morning. It will take a couple of days to get across Texas but we plan to be in Las Vegas on Sunday. Tourism is down there during the holidays and rooms are cheap. We have reserved one at the Orleans for $20 a night. Hot water and towels in a town with street signs! What luxury.

This evening we got veggie frozen dinners at a local health food store, and some flan. There are 74 channels on TV and internet in the room. Include a tube of cortisone for the many mosquito bites I got camping and it ammounts to an excellent evening. I hope everyone has a sweet, homey holiday. Remember to share it with the animals.


Invite a turkey for dinner or share a meal with a homeless animal.


Mexico, homeless dog at Palenque ruins in Mexico. He was so sad. Seeing him broke my heart.

Animals in Katrina's wake

Hurricane Katrina left countless animals abandoned and starving on the streets. They need help too. Please write congress and the senate and insist that federal rescue operations include them. Also ask that animal welfare organizations be allowed into the area to do their work.

Contact
Congressional representatives
Senators

Donate
Humane Society Disaster Relief Fund
North Shore Animal League of America

International Fund for Animal Welfare
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals

Australia's secret shame

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have called a 45-day moratorium on the campaign against mulesing mutilations and live-sheep exports to allow the Australian Wool Growers Association time to reach an agreement with its members. According to AWGA chair Chick Olsson, talks with PETA have established "workable criteria, that will ultimately benefit all, wool growers, retailers and consumers as well as animal welfare concerns."

I certainly hope so. Mulesing is the process of cutting flesh from the bodies of unmedicated sheep. It defines barbarism but not if you go by Woolisbest sanitized version of the process. Like most propaganda, their argument is based on fact, but like all propaganda, it squints at reality, obscures the argument and omits crucial facts. PETA offers a far more realistic view of mulesing.

What the industry film omits is the fact that they don't anesthetize the animal first. The sheep and lambs are aware, terrified and in a lot of unnecessary pain. They call their technique "surgical". Big whoop. Nazi "doctors"called their death camp experiments "surgical". They splice in the beatific faces of peaceful lambs hoping we will assume this is how lambs look as they are being hacked.

The agreement also raises the standard of care given sheep while shipping them to the slaughterhouse. Ironic, isn't it? As it stands, after the sheep are no longer profitable to the wool merchants, they are crammed aboard multilayered, open deck, disease ridden ships, with little or no access to food or water and must endure a weeks- or months-long journey through all weather extremes to their awaiting deaths. Along the way, sick and injured sheep are routinely ground up in a mincer while fully aware.

Unfortunately the AWGA does not represent the majority of  in Australia who are still opposed to giving up mulesing or medicating the sheep during the process. They'd rather cling to their oh-so-conveniently ignorant past. Old ways die hard. Ask the sheep.

Here's to you, Bubba.

However sentimental people may be about Muffy, proud of Rex, or vindicated rooting for the underdog, the idea of animal rights for the masses is generally considered weird or silly. On matters of life and death and what's for dinner, the minister, rabbi, priest or mullah have final say. That means the members of other species are generally shit out of luck.

Rest in Peace, old boy.

Bubba the Leviathan Lobster, as he was called, died today before making it to an aquarium at a Ripley's Believe It or Not museum. His size generated enough interest and support that he escaped the grim fate of lobsters that fall into human hands. PETA (People for the Eating of Tasty Animals) battled PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) and kindness won the day. But Bubba died anyway. They don't know why. My guess...fear. I suppose that's better than being boiled alive Here's to you Bubba and all the others.

International Day for Animal Rights

Friday, December 10th, is the 7th annual International Animal Rights Day (IARD). People all over the world will be gathering in candlelight vigils calling for the recognition of the Universal Declaration of Animal Rights. Count me in. I'm lighting a candle or three in my little room.

UDAR excerpt:
"Ultimately, the rights of animals threaten the freedom of some human beings to use them as they see fit, or to further their own particular ends. The arguments against the rights of animals withstand neither logical nor ethical scrutiny because they are the rearguard action of a defeated, specious philosophy.

The rights of human beings have been won at the expense of the privileges of the rich and the powerful, and in the face of their resistance. The source of resistance to this emancipation of animals is not reason or justice, but a false notion of human self-interest."

So? A candle. Big whoop. What difference can it possible make? But, in spite of this mocking inner voice, I'm doing it anyway, joining in spirit with others who believe that in an ethical and humane society animals need and deserve rights as well.

UDAR excerpt:
"Science, as much as experience, teaches us that it is no longer possible to assume that animals are mere machines, or bundles of instinct and reflex: they may flourish in freedom or languish under oppression just as we do. We may no longer seek refuge in ignorance."

"There will come a day when such men as myself will view the slaughter of innocent creatures as horrible a crime as the murder of his fellow man. Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and
its beauty". ~ Albert Einstein

Kosher Law, animal holocaust

"There will come a day when such men as myself will view the slaughter of innocent creatures as horrible a crime as the murder of his fellow man. Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty. " ~ Albert Einstein

I'm still shaking. If you've got the guts, watch this just-released undercover footage taken at the Agriprocessors Inc. slaughter house in Postville, Iowa. Here's the five minute version. Or, if you're up to a larger dose of reality, watch the full length version (one half hour). There's also a New York Times article on it. Talk about hell on earth. In one scene, a slaughter house worker even kicks blood in the face of a struggling cow after he rips out her trachea and esophagus. This is all under the supervision and approval of the attendending Rabbi, who claims the cows "feel nothing"! Incredible. What ignorance. It is deeply ironic and horrifying when religious law overrules empathy. What is God if not love? And compassion?

As newspaper articles tend to disappear pretty quickly, I'm including the entire text of NYTs article below.

Videotapes Show Grisly Scenes at Kosher Slaughterhouse
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

Published: November 30, 2004

An animal-rights group released grisly undercover videotapes today showing cows in a major kosher slaughterhouse in Iowa staggering and bellowing in seeming agony long after their throats were cut.

The plant, run by Agriprocessors Inc. in Postville, Iowa, is being denounced as inhumane by the group, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and by several experts on animal science and kosher practice.

But the plant's supervising rabbi said the tapes were "testimony that this is being done right." And representatives of the Orthodox Union, the leading organization that certifies kosher products, said that while the pictures were not pretty, they did not make the case that the slaughterhouse is violating kosher law.

The plant is the country's largest producer of meat certified as glatt kosher, the highest standard for cleanliness under kosher law. (Glatt means smooth, or free of the lung blemishes that might indicate disease.) Employing 600 people and selling under the popular Aaron's Best brand, it is the only American plant allowed to export to Israel.

On the 30-minute tape, each animal is placed in a rotating drum so it can be killed while upside down, as required by Orthodox rabbis in Israel. Immediately after the shochet, or ritual slaughterer, has slit the throat, another worker tears open each steer's neck with a hook and pulls out the trachea and esophagus. The drum rotates, and the steer is dumped on the floor. One after another, animals with dangling windpipes stand up or try to; in one case, death takes three minutes.

In most kosher plants, animals are tightly penned while their throats are slashed, and the organs are not torn; tearing by the shochet is forbidden under Jewish law. In nonkosher plants, animals by law must be made unconscious before they are killed.

Virtually all defenders of kosher slaughter, called shechita, insist that the prescribed rapid cut with a razor-sharp two-foot blade is humane because it causes instant and painless death. Jewish law also forbids killing injured or sick animals, so they may not be stunned first, either with clubs as in ancient times or with air hammers, pistols or electricity today.

Federal law considers properly conducted religious slaughter to be humane, and so allows Jewish as well as Muslim slaughterhouses to forgo stunning. But federal rules outlaw leaving animals killed that way conscious "for an extended period of time."

Rabbi Chaim Kohn, of the Agriprocessors plant, says the cows feel nothing, even as they struggle on the floor and slamm their heads into walls. "Unconsciousness and the external behavior of the animal have nothing to do with shechita," he said. Because the throat-tearing happens after the shochet's cut, he said, it does not render the animal nonkosher.

Other experts in kosher law were divided on the issue.

Rabbis Menachem Genack and Yisroel Belsky, the chief experts for the Orthodox Union, which certifies over 600,000 products as kosher - including Aaron's Best meats - said the killings on the tape, while "gruesome," appeared kosher because the shochet checked to make sure he had severed both the trachea and esophagus.

Scientific studies, Rabbi Belsky said, found that an animal whose brain had lost blood pressure when its throat was slit felt nothing and any motions it made were involuntary.

"The perfect model is the headless chicken running around," said Rabbi Genack.

Both rabbis said they were willing to revisit the plant and study whether tearing the throat or letting steers thrash on the ground violated Talmudic proscriptions against cruelty to animals.

The union, they said, prefers a type of pen designed by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, in which steers are killed standing up with their weight supported. They were designed in the 1950's so American kosher plants could stop killing live animals suspended on chains, which was seen as both cruel and dangerous to the slaughterer.

But a spokesman for Shechita UK, a British lobbying group that defends ritual slaughter against the protests of animal-rights activists, said after watching the tape with a rabbi and a British shochet that he "felt queasy," and added,"I don't know what that is, but it's not shechita."

The spokesman, Shimon Cohen, said that in Britain an animal must be restrained for 30 seconds to bleed, and no second cut is allowed. Done correctly, he said, a shochet's cut must produce instantaneous unconsciousness, so Agriprocessors' meat could not be considered kosher.

Asked how prominent authorities could disagree over such a fundamental issue, he replied: "Well, we don't have a pope. You do find rabbis who interpret things in different ways."

Dr. Temple Grandin, a veterinarian at Colorado State University who designs humane slaughter plants, viewed the tape last week without knowing the location. She called it "an atrocious abomination, nothing like I've seen in 30 kosher plants I've visited here and in England, France, Ireland and Canada."

She said the throat-tearing violated federal anti-cruelty law. "Nothing in the Humane Slaughter Act says you can start dismembering an animal while it's still conscious," she said.

A spokesman for the Department of Agriculture, which also certifies the plant, said it had not received the tapes yet and had no comment.

Rabbi Kohn, of Agriprocessors, said the throat-tearing was done only to speed bleeding. Recent Federal rules for slaughterhouse inspectors do recognize "the ritual cut and any additional cut to facilitate bleeding" as different from skinning or butchering, which is forbidden "until the animal is insensible."

The plant is at the center of a 2000 book, "Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America," by Stephen G. Bloom, which described the tensions in the tiny farming town between residents and Hasidic Jews from Brooklyn who took over its defunct slaughterhouse in 1987.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, known as PETA, posted the tapes at GoVeg.com today and demanded that the plant be prosecuted for animal cruelty and decertified by kosher authorities. While the group advocates vegetarianism, it accepts that shechita can be relatively painless, said Bruce Friedrich, a spokesman.

Mr. Friedrich said that after two fruitless years of pressing Agriprocessors to improve conditions, PETA sent a volunteer to the plant with a hidden camera for seven weeks last summer.

The cameraman, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he had no trouble being hired (he was assigned to the sausage department) or filming during his lunch hours and on days he called in sick.

"I'm glad I did it," said the young man, who became a vegetarian and volunteered for undercover work two years ago after seeing a PETA videotape. "I wish people who eat meat could stand where I did and see the things I saw."

Meat from the Agriprocessors plant can end up in any market or restaurant. Because Jewish law requires that the sciatic nerves and certain fats be cut out, which tears up the meat until it can only be sold as hamburger, the hindquarters of virtually all kosher-killed steers are sold as conventional meat.

Happy Thanksgiving
How about Tofurkey instead?

Thanksgiving transmogrified

Bird and Piano Wire Compass
Thanksgiving is a hellish time for the turkeys so I'm dedicating this drawing I did recently to them. I don't know about you, but we're having a yummy Tofurky for our family feast.


We're just not into supporting slaughter house food. This turkey, for example, may still be alive. By law, they are supposed to be stunned so that they feel no pain before their throats are cut; but very often the stun only paralyzes their muscles, leaving them fully conscious and filled with great fear and pain. "You are what you eat." And it is not uncommon for these poor creatures to still be alive when they are dropped into the vat of boiling water, meant to remove their feathers.

If you're like most people, this is an unwelcome subject but ignorance is not bliss. If you've got the stomach and the heart to see what happens to that bird before it reaches the table, there's a pretty good photo journal at all-creatures.org. The sit's a bit too religious for me, but I certainly agree in spirit. For instance, they believe the breeder's practice of masturbating male turkeys is wrong because it's a sin. But that's an obtuse argument, especially if you don't believe in god. It's simpler than that. The practice is inhumane and therefore a violation of animal rights. Why drag god into the argument, especially as some people think their god wants them to torture and kill. Take Bush for example. But back to my Thanksgiving rant. The turkey report is accurate and timely for the upcoming Christian holidays. Some moral majority. Didn't Falwell's Jesus tell them, "What you do unto the least of them, you do unto me."

I'm all for liberating the turkeys and feeding them pumpkin pie.