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Agreement Raises Flags for Egg-Laying Hens: A Chicken Activist’s Perspective on the "New Deal"

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  March 2012:

Agreement Raises Flags for Egg-Laying Hens:  A Chicken Activist’s Perspective on the “New Deal”
by Karen Davis,  PhD,  founder & president of United Poultry Concerns
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The January/February 2012 edition of ANIMAL PEOPLE included a full-page ad headlined “It’s Time to Ban Barren Battery Cages Nationwide,”  urging readers to ask Congress to support the Egg Products Inspection Act Amendments of 2012.
The ad told us that “All the groups that have been leading the fight to ban battery cages-such as those listed below-actively support this legislation, because it’s the best opportunity to help the largest number of farm animals.” Read more

Federal laying hen standards bill goes before Congress

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  March 2012:

Federal laying hen standards bill goes before Congress

WASHINGTON D.C.–Awaited for seven months,  a proposed federal law governing the care of laying hens was on January 23,  2012 introduced by Oregon Member of the House of Representatives Kurt Schrader.  Assigned bill number HR 3798,  the draft legislation results from a July 2011 pact between the Humane Society of the U.S. and United Egg Producers,  the largest trade association representing U.S. egg farmers.  Under the agreement,  HSUS withdrew ballot initiative campaigns seeking laying hen standards in Washington and Oregon,  in exchange for UEP collaboration in pursuit of a weaker federal standard which would govern the entire U.S. laying hen industry.

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Why an ancient armored mammal needs better defenses

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  March 2012:

Why an ancient armored mammal needs better defenses

 

HONG KONG–“We have uncovered disturbing information which strongly suggests that ‘medicinal use’ pangolin farms are already operating in China,”  said Project Pangolin founders Rhishja Cota-Larson and Sarah Pappin on January 16,  2012.

 

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“The emergence of pangolin farming,”  Cota-Larson and Pappin suggested,  “may help provide insight into why the world is losing pangolins at such an alarming rate–an estimated 40,000 killed in 2011– and why China’s appetite for pangolins continues to increase.” As with bear bile and tiger farming,  the growth of a captive population enables sellers to encourage customers to buy more pangolin products,  even as the exploited species disappears from the wild.

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The conservation aspect of the disappearance of pangolins has drawn the most attention so far,   but the suffering of individual pangolins is considerable.  Most pangolins taken from the wild are transported to markets and sold alive,  if the poachers can keep them alive.  This is also believed to be the fate of farmed pangolins.  If pangolins die in transport or markets,  their remains are frozen and sold. Read more

Editorial: Evolving an ethical response to mice & rats

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  March 2012:

Editorial:  Evolving an ethical response to mice & rats

Probably the most ethically vexatious of all mammals,  if not all sentient beings,  are mice and rats–who are also by far the most numerous,  problematic,  and at times the most deadly of all non-insect pests to human beings.

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From the origins of food storage,  well before the beginnings of agriculture,  mice and rats were the most ubiquitous and successful of food thieves.  We owe our long association with dogs in great part to the role of dogs as rodent hunters,  attracted not only to our refuse but to the chance to eat the mice and rats who were already feasting on it. Read more

NIH announces end of funding for buying cats from Class B dealers

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  March 2012:

NIH announces end of funding for buying cats from Class B dealers

WASHINGTON D.C.–-The National Institutes of Health on February 8,  2012 published notice that NIH grantees will be prohibited after October 1, 2012 “from using NIH funds to procure cats from USDA Class B dealers.  The procurement of cats may only be from USDA Class A dealers or other approved legal sources,”  the NIH said. Read more

U.S. Supreme Court overturns California law requiring downers to be euthanized

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  March 2012:

U.S. Supreme Court overturns California law requiring downers to be euthanized

WASHINGTON D.C.— The U.S. Supreme Court on January 23,  2012 unanimously overturned a 2008 California law requiring slaughterhouses to immediately euthanize non-ambulatory livestock.

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Focused on the issue of federal primacy over state legislation,  the legal reasoning behind the 9-0 verdict signaled that the Supreme Court is likely to favor uniform national standards for livestock handling in any situation where state and federal law are perceived to be in conflict.  This could mean any situation in which states have adopted supplementary humane standards meant to address gaps in federal laws which were last updated by Congress several decades ago. Read more

Editorial—The "Animal Rights Agenda" 25 years later

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  January/February 2012:

The “Animal Rights Agenda” 25 years later

 

“Politics of Animal Liberation” was the formal title of an ad hoc document prepared in 1987 by ANIMAL PEOPLE president Kim Bartlett, Animal Rights International founder Henry Spira, feminist theorist Marti Kheel,  and others who formed an animal rights caucus at that year’s Green Party national convention.  Spira,  who died in 1989,  Kheel,  who died in November 2011, and Bartlett sought without success to win inclusion of the principles outlined in “Politics of Animal Liberation” in the U.S. Green Party platform.

Bartlett,  then editor of the Animals’ Agenda magazine,  subsequently published “Politics of Animal Liberation” in the magazine as a discussion document,  but little discussion followed.  Apparently not controversial with Animals’ Agenda readers,  “Politics of Animal Liberation” was never formally presented to animal rights organizations for ratification. There has never actually been any mechanism through which the many different organizations representing what they perceive as the animal rights cause might have adopted a collective mission statement.  Yet in the years since 1987, “Politics of Animal Liberation” has been extensively reprinted around the world by people on all sides of the issues as “The Animal Rights Agenda,”   and remains widely accepted as such. Read more

Criminal justice

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  January/February 2012:

VICTORVILLE,  California— Convicted on December 6,  2012 of
committing the 2009 contract murder of Jesus Rocha Sr. on his chicken
ranch near Helendale,  California,  Edgar Gutierrez, 40,  and David
Gomez, 18,  face life in prison without parole.  Co-defendant Oscar
Acosta,  who testified against them,  could receive 35 years to life
in prison.  A fourth co-defendant,  Jose Sosa,  who acted as lookout
during the murder and also testified against the others,  is expected
to receive a sentence of 13 years and eight months.  Gutierrez
allegedly paid Gomez and Acosta $5,000 each to kill a man who lived
with Rocha whom Gutierrez claimed had not paid him $10,000 in
connection with arranging the sale of a gamecock.  They killed Rocha
when Rocha found them on the property. Read more

Obituaries

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  January/February 2012:

Obituaries

 

“I come to bury Caesar,  not to praise him.  The evil that men do
lives after them.  The good is oft interred with their bones.”
–William Shakespeare

Lynn M. Gorfinkle, 64,  of Redding,  Connecticut,  died on
December 25,  2011 in Danbury Hospital.  The longtime president of
the Animal Rights Alliance of Fairfield County,  and active in cat
rescue with her friend Natalie Jarnstadt of Project Save A Cat,
Gorfinkle was best known for opposition to deer hunting and culling.
Gorfinkle “would not, if she were stranded on a desert island with
only a rabbit, eat that rabbit in order to survive,”  wrote Rob
Inglis of Yale Daily News in 2006.  “She thinks that modern-day
American sport hunters–especially deer hunters–are morally
deficient and probably ‘hung like hamsters.'”  Hunting media
denounced Gorfinkle from coast to coast three years later,  after a
bowhunter wounded a deer who fled to the Gorfinkle property before
dying.  Her husband Mike Gorfinkle refused to allow the hunter to
retrieve the deer. “If someone’s going to eat that deer,  I want it
to be natural predators,  not some hunter,”  Lynn Gorfinkle told
reporters.  Coyotes dragged away the carcass about two weeks later. Read more

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