The Richmond Animal Protection Society, who I don’t hear about very often, has announced that they are attempting to stop the sale of pets in pet stores.
The society is pushing for a ban on the sale of all dogs, cats and rabbits by pet stores in Richmond. Meanwhile Richmond City Hall is examining tighter restrictions on pet stores.
I think this is a great move, even if it only serves to draw attention to the terrible irresponsibility of buying and selling animals.
There's nothing safe about meat.
The meat industry is gambling with human lives by using antibiotics in livestock.
The unfortunate fact is that on today’s intensive farming operations, antibiotics are necessary to keep the animals from all getting sick and dying. The only problem is that bacteria mutate rapidly and antibiotic resistant strains pop up here and there.
In an article from Grist, “Antibiotic-resistant salmonella burgers, with a side of flame retardants“, we learn of a recall of tainted meat: “In Colorado, 14 people have fallen ill from hamburger meat tainted with antibiotic-resistent salmonella”.
466,236 pounds of meat were recalled.
The article goes on to describe in detail the rampant antibiotic use in livestock production, and how it is threatening human health.
So are we any safer in Canada? Probably not. Antibiotics are used in livestock in Canada as well, and MRSA (antibiotic resistant staph infections) has been found on pig farms in Canada. In fact, the Canadian beef industry has been lobbying to allow for the import of unregulated antibiotics from the United States – with no thought as to the potential for creating antibiotic resistance bacteria through overuse of the antibiotics.
We need to change our food system before it kills us all.
Amanda Daniel, who writes a blog called “Into the Eyes of God” sent me a link to a story in Forbes Magazine called “The Locavore Myth.”
Forbes: The Locavore Myth
The author, James E. McWilliams, starts off with:
Buy local, shrink the distance food travels, save the planet. The locavore movement has captured a lot of fans. To their credit, they are highlighting the problems with industrialized food. But a lot of them are making a big mistake. By focusing on transportation, they overlook other energy-hogging factors in food production.
Here is one challenge to the goodness of buying local:
Locavores argue that buying local food supports an area’s farmers and, in turn, strengthens the community. Fair enough. Left unacknowledged, however, is the fact that it also hurts farmers in other parts of the world. The U.K. buys most of its green beans from Kenya. While it’s true that the beans almost always arrive in airplanes–the form of transportation that consumes the most energy–it’s also true that a campaign to shame English consumers with small airplane stickers affixed to flown-in produce threatens the livelihood of 1.5 million sub-Saharan farmers.
Hmmm… had we thought of that when we were hunting for locally grown beans? I know rice is another example. It’s far less energy intensive to fly rice from Asia to Canada than it is to try to grow rice in California and ship it a much shorter distance because so much energy has to go into creating the environment for rice through irrigation – an environment that exists naturally halfway around the world.
Proponents of local food often don’t take economies of scale into account:
To take an extreme example, a shipper sending a truck with 2,000 apples over 2,000 miles would consume the same amount of fuel per apple as a local farmer who takes a pickup 50 miles to sell 50 apples at his stall at the green market. The critical measure here is not food miles but apples per gallon.
Then there’s the issue of meat:
Until our food system becomes more transparent, there is one thing you can do to shrink the carbon footprint of your dinner: Take the meat off your plate. No matter how you slice it, it takes more energy to bring meat, as opposed to plants, to the table. It takes 6 pounds of grain to make a pound of chicken and 10 to 16 pounds to make a pound of beef. That difference translates into big differences in inputs. It requires 2,400 liters of water to make a burger and only 13 liters to grow a tomato. A majority of the water in the American West goes toward the production of pigs, chickens and cattle.
The Canadian meat industry is pretty much the same as the American. We deal with essentially the same geography and irrigation issues with ranching and intensive farming.
So, what does he conclude?
If you want to make a statement, ride your bike to the farmer’s market. If you want to reduce greenhouse gases, become a vegetarian.
Yup. Enough said.
We miss you Beanie.
Beanie died tonight.
As so often is the case with rabbits it happened suddenly and almost without warning.
Yesterday he had seemed fine, was running around and eating like normal. When we got home this evening he was barely moving and his temperature was very low. He just slowly died and there wasn’t anything we could do about it.
Beanie was a wonderful boy, and his girlfriend Rainy seems sad without him. They were almost inseperable. He would squish himself down on the floor so that she could clean the top of his head, and they would lie down pressed against each other.
Beanie is the second boy that she has lost.
Beanie also loved to dig. He did most of the digging on the giant hole in the backyard. Sometimes we wouldn’t even be able to bring him in because he would hide down in his hole. Then he’d just stay outside all night (we have a rabit-proofed back yard).
We think he was around 8 years old or so. His first guardian will be able to tell us exactly, since she adopted him from the SPCA when he was just a baby.
Because rabbits are prey animals in nature, they hide any symptoms of sickness that they have. One of our earlier rabbits, Rupert, seemed fine and energetic until one day, all of a sudden, he lost all his energy. His body was filled with cancer. He must have been in pain for a long time, but never showed it. I miss him too.
I miss all of them. It’s so sad when anyone dies.
Bye Beanie, we love you.
Veal huts in Abbotsford, BC
If you’ve ever driven through Abbotsford or any other rural farming community, you may have seen little white huts set up outside of dairy farms. These are veal huts. Occasionally they contain female calves, but most often they contain the males.
Pretty much all of the male cavles born on dairy farms become veal. This is an unfortunate fact of dairy production. In order to produce milk, cows need to give birth. They have one calf per year for however long they are being milked (4 years or so usually). The dairy farms can use the females to replace the older, “spent” cows, but the males aren’t good for anything.
These calves are taken from their mothers right after they are born and tethered in these white huts so that they can’t run around or play with each other. The dairy industry says this is so that they won’t fight with each other or get sick. They don’t have their own mother’s milk to drink (we drink that) so they are not passed any natural disease resistance from her, as would be the case in nature.
That’s about it. Their lives are spent standing around, laying down, doing nothing. Because they never got to nurse they will try to suckle on anything. It seems cute, but it’s really a sign that their instincts are being thwarted. Just as their mother’s reproductive system has been hijacked for our own benefit (the benefits of milk are greatly debatable) these little boys have their bodies hijacked to produce the soft and tender veal that we all love.
Carol Adams wrote a book several years ago called Living Among Meat-Eaters: The Vegetarian’s Survival Handbook, which I haven’t read. But I hear it’s a really good guide to dealing with all those pesky and annoying meat-eaters we have to live with and deal with everyday.
Many of us haven’t always been vegetarian and have friends who are meat-eaters. For those of us who are activists, this can get very stressful.
Maintaining a relationship with someone who doesn’t share the same values, the same morals and ethics, can be extremely challenging. Especially when we have focused so much on those issues in our own lives and are actively working to change public opinions about animals.
Here’s the one piece of advice I have for these situations: have a sense of humor. A really big and all-encompassing sense of humor. Laugh at everything. The suffering of animals is serious business, but I’ve found that humor is the best way for me to deal with other people.
Meat-eaters like to joke around about eating meat. Often I think that this is just their way of defending themselves. One time I was at dinner and one guy was making jokes about meat, which I laughed at. A few days later I found out that he was going to be vegetarian. You never know. Being serious and taking offense to what meat-eaters say and do just allows them to remain defensive. Laughter opens and lowers barriers.
Laugh. Laugh a lot.
[Thanks Andrea for the idea for this one. Sorry it wasn't a better post!]
If you are comfortable writing and already spend time sharing information with your friends using facebook or email, you may want to consider starting a blog. As is quite evident from my posts on this blog, you don’t have to be any good at writing to write blog posts.
Here are some tips for getting started with a blog:
That’s about it. Blogging can be very simple and easy to do. Adding your voice to the other animal rights bloggers strengthens our voice and builds the community. Make sure you have fun, be nice, and write for the animals!
The Animal Defense and Anti-Vivisection Society of BC was founded almost a hundred years ago (sorry, I forget the exact date) to oppose the use of animals in scientific experiments.
They are still around and still focused on stopping the bad science of animal testing and animal experimentation, in addition to promotion of kindness towards animals in all areas.
If you are interested in working on anti-vivisection issues in the Vancouver area, you may want to get in touch with them. They are always looking for volunteers for leafleting and tabling events, especially since so much animal testing is conducted in and around Vancouver (VGH, UBC, SFU, etc).
From their website:
The problem of animal experimentation is complex, many-sided and hard to fathom. The cruel and deadly use of animals has been legalised by politicians, justified by church institutions, described as unavoidable by science and industry, accepted without criticism by too many people not interested in the sufferings of others, and defended in every way by all those who gain profit from it. — Werner Hartinger, MD, Surgeon. ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION: ITS RELATIONSHIP TO THE LAW, SCIENCE, INDUSTRY AND POLITICAL REALITY.
I’m thinking about farmland this time – the wonderfully fertile soil where we now grow tons and tons of corn and soy and not much else.
Currently, most of the corn and soy grown in North America (Canada and the US are virtually identical in this case) feeds animals raised for food. In Canada I’ve heard that about 70% of the grain grown feeds livestock. Soy is probably similar.
Cornfield
If we were not feeding all of this corn and soy to animals, if we were not using these thousands and thousands of acres to grow this two crops, we could be growing a wonderful variety of vegetables, grains, and legumes to feed humans.
Imagine driving through the midwest United States and instead of seeing miles and miles of corn, you see peas and beans and squash, lettuce, kale, tomatoes, potatoes, chickpeas, and any number of other edible plants. Think of the colours and variety.
Think of how healthy we could all be with the amazing variety of foods we are capable of growing.
I read a lot of blogs. A lot.
Well, I guess I scan a whole lot of blogs. Some are animal rights blogs, some are industry blogs, some are food, local, friends, or other interesting blogs. (I personally have a range of interests, so my feed reader includes a bunch of non-profit and design blogs as well.)
Here is a list of the animal rights blogs that I find to be consistently interesting, informative, and well-written. I’ve grouped them into must-read, consistently good, and inspirational. The main point is that if you only have the time to read a few blogs, the blogs in the first group will give you a whole lot of information for the least effort. The second group are good, and informative, but are occasionally more personal or less immediately useful. The third group are just good blogs that are great to read, but for more inspiration than anything else.
Am I missing any blogs you would consider important or vital? I’ve never been very concerned with food blogs (not that they aren’t valuable!), so I’m probably missing a whole lot of ones there. Feel free to leave your ideas in the comments!
