Who has the mandate to speak for farm animals?

November 1, 2011 juanitoG Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November/December 2011:

Editorial Feature

Controversy continues in this November/December 2011 edition of ANIMAL PEOPLE,
as in almost every edition since July/August 2010, over agreements reached during the past 18 months among animal charities and entities representing agribusiness. In dispute are both the substance of the agreements themselves, which concern the lives, suffering, and deaths of more animals than are involved in all other animal advocacy issues combined, and the even greater question of who is ethically entitled to speak for the interests of livestock. Read more

Feral animals in Hawaii: pig hunting leads to dog abuse

October 1, 2011 juanitoG Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2011:

Commentary by Kim Bartlett

Visiting Hawaii in early 2011, I was driven around the island of Hawaii 1.5 times and the island of Oahu once, but I never caught sight of one of the pigs who are said to be wreaking so much havoc.

Feral pigs are blamed for nibbling crops, including macadamia nut trees, and also for eating from people’s garbage cans. On a bus tour of the island of Hawaii, in a forested stretch of highway north of Hilo, the driver called out that a pig was crossing the road ahead of us, but the pig was gone before I saw him. The driver seemed surprised to have spotted one. Read more

Editorial: The shelter killing of pit bulls

October 1, 2011 juanitoG Leave a comment

Editorial feature—

More adoptions will not end shelter killing of pit bulls

Tangible progress on behalf of animals is often hard to recognize, amid paradoxes such as polling data showing that more people think about farm animal welfare even as world meat consumption is at an all-time high and rising.

Just about everyone agrees, though, that the past 25 years have produced unprecedented improvement in the human relationship with dogs, especially here in the United States. Americans keep half again more pet dogs than in 1986. Average spending per dog per year for food, toys, and accessories has increased from $58 in 1986–with purchasing power worth $114 today–to $347. Yet sales of doghouses, once the most costly common dog accessory, have crashed, because most dogs today live indoors with their people. Read more

EDITORIAL: Animal husbandry & the Horn of Africa famine

September 1, 2011 juanitoG Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2011:

Editorial feature:
Animal husbandry & the Horn of Africa famine

“In central and western Kenya, farmers have had a bumper crop of plump ears of corn and earthy potatoes. Yet in the north, skeletal children wait for food aid amid a growing emergency,” recounted Katharine Houreld of Associated Press on September 1, 2011.

Altogether, Houreld wrote, 3.75 million Kenyans are at risk of starvation. Another eight million people are at risk in Ethiopia, Sudan, and Somalia. Read more

Editorial feature: Who is speaking out for pigs & who is eating them

July 1, 2011 juanitoG Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2011:

Park described the suicides of some of the workers who performed the live burials, and said she found the scenes she videotaped so depressing that she wanted to jump into the pits herself, but she could not get close enough…”

Mercy for Animals, having already produced more shocking undercover videos of mistreatment of animals on factory farms than all other U.S. animal advocacy organizations combined, on June 29, 2011 shocked television and web viewers yet again with footage from inside an Iowa Select Farms facility in Kamrar, Iowa.

Iowa Select Farms supplies Swift, one of the biggest names in meatpacking. Read more

Editorial feature: Slaughtering animals, crime, & societal health

June 1, 2011 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2011:
Phillip Danforth Armour (1832-1901) is
today remembered only for the meatpacking company
he founded, but in his own time was lauded for
allegedly contributing to the progress of
civilization by moving animal slaughter out of
sight, smell, and sound of women, children,
and decent men.
Born into an upstate New York farming
family, Armour drove barge-hauling mules
alongside the Chenango Canal in his teens, then
walked all the way to California at age 19 to
join the Gold Rush. He soon discovered that more
gold was to be made by starting a Placerville
butcher shop than in mining.

Editorial feature: Getting wise to “invasive species” rhetoric

May 1, 2011 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2011:

In the name of eradicating non-native
“invasive” species, the Texas House of
Representatives on April 4, 2011 voted 137-9 in
favor of a bill to allow landowners to sell
hunters the chance to shoot feral pigs and
coyotes from helicopters.
Feral pigs have only been in Texas for
about 300 years, twice as long as ten-gallon
Stetson hats and Texas-style cowboy boots, but
coyotes have evolved in the vicinity from their
Miacias ancestors for 12 to 15 million years.
Indeed coyotes much resembling those of today had
already inhabited Texas for approximately nine
million years before the first creature even
dimly resembling a Texas legislator evolved
knuckle-walking in what is now Kenya and Ethiopia
and began to stand upright.

Editorial feature: Art, nukes, & ethical energy

April 1, 2011 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2011:

Chilean shock artist Marco Evaristti won global notoriety in
February 2000 with an exhibit at the Trapholt Art Museum in Kolding,
Denmark, consisting of 10 blenders containing live goldfish.
Visitors were invited to puree a goldfish.
Friends of Animals/Denmark, not affiliated with the U.S.
organization Friends of Animals, won an injunction ordering that the
electricity supply to the blenders should be cut off. When two
goldfish were pureed anyhow, FoA/Denmark pursued criminal charges
against Evaristti and museum director Peter Meyer. The case against
Meyer went to court in May 2003. Meyer was acquitted, but even in
Denmark, whose national identity is intertwined with commercial
fishing, whale massacres in the Faroe Islands, and the Copenhagen
fur trade, public opinion clearly rejected the notion of pulverizing
live fish as “art.”

EDITORIAL: Empowerment through understanding the phases of a cause

January 1, 2011 juanitoG Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2011:

Editorial feature:
Empowerment through understanding the phases of a cause

Social Movement Empowerment Project founder Bill Moyer was last mentioned in ANIMAL PEOPLE in his obituary, published in our January/February 2003 edition. His insights, however, have helped to inform almost every ANIMAL PEOPLE editorial.

A key strategist for Martin Luther King’s 1966 open housing campaign in Chicago, Moyer after 1972 spent the rest of his life teaching advocacy tactics. At invitation of ANIMAL PEOPLE president Kim Bartlett, who was then editor of the long defunct Animals’ Agenda magazine, and Friends of Animals president Priscilla Feral, Moyer in September 1989 visited Stamford, Connecticut, to present one of his Movement Action Plan workshops to about 40 leaders of national animal rights groups. Read more

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