BOOKS: Enslaved by Ducks

May 1, 2004 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2004:

Enslaved by Ducks by Bob Tarte * Algonquin Books (127 Kingston Dr.
#105, Chapel Hill, NC 27514). 308 pages. Hardcover, $23.95.

Freelance writer Bob Tarte some years ago left the city and
moved with his wife Linda to a property in rural Mitchigan. Linda
started acquiring birds and Tarte found himself constructing cages
and doing all the menial work that went into caring for them.
When Tarte finally realized that he no longer had a life of
his own and that he had become a slave to a demanding avian family,
he wrote Enslaved by Ducks. Full of humorous anecdotes about the
interaction of various species of pet and farm birds with each other,
and with the Tartes, Enslaved by Ducks is a mine of information for
people who look after parrots and other birds. Years of patient
caring and literally painful learning have made Bob and Linda animal
behaviorists par excellence, graduates cum laude from the school of
hard knocks.
Enslaved by Ducks is much more than a mere recital of events.
The Tartes display an admirable ability to learn from experience,
and to achieve a better understanding of the psychology of their
birds and other animals. Their kindness and genuine empathy for
their various unusual pets encroaches deep into Bob Tarte’s limited
leisure time and causes him to suffer anxiety attacks. Linda Tarte
suffers a painful back strain that eventually compels her to sleep on
the floor.

Baby seals & bull calves bear the cruel weight of idolatry

May 1, 2004 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2004:

The 350,000 baby harp seals who were clubbed or shot and
often skinned alive on the ice floes off eastern Canada this spring
had more in common with the thousands of bull calves who were
abandoned at temples in India during the same weeks than just being
days-old mammals subjected to unconscionable mistreatment.
Unlike the much smaller numbers of seals who were killed off
Russia, Norway, and Finland, and unlike the somewhat smaller
numbers of bull calves who were shoved into veal crates here in the
U.S., Canadian harp seal pups and Indian surplus bull calves are
victims not only of human economic exploitation, but also of their
roles as icons and idols.
The words “icon” and “idol” have a common origin in the
ancient Greek word that means “image.” Yet they mean such different
things–and have for so long–that two of the Judaic Ten
Commandments, about setting no other God before the One God and not
worshipping graven images, sternly address the difference.
An icon is a physical image representative of a holy concept,
usually but not always depicting a person who is believed to have
exemplified the concept in the conduct of his or her life. Icons may
also depict animals, abstract symbols, supernatural beings, or
deities. A icon may be venerated for being symbolic of the holy
concept, but to venerate it for its own sake is considered idolatry,
and therefore wrong in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic faiths,
as well as in some branches of other major religions.

U.N. Food & Agricultural Organization includes animal welfare considerations in plan to “stamp out” deadly avian flu

April 1, 2004 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2004:

GENEVA–The United Nations Food and
Agricultural Organization, not known for
pro-animal stances, on March 18 recommended as
part of the FAO “Control Strategies for Highly
Pathogenic Avian Influenza (H5N1) in Asia” that
involved nations should “Provide humane
euthanasia methods for all animals to be
euthanized.”
The recommendation was included as the
sixth of nine points emphasized under the subhead
“Stamping-out policy for infected poultry
(including Valuation, Disposal, Cleaning and
Disinfection, Biosecurity and Animal Welfare).”
The inclusion of an expressed concern for
animal welfare, while not unprecedented, hints
at an FAO response to the view expressed earlier
by World Health Organiz-ation spokesperson Peter
Cordingly that, “It might be time, although
this is none of WHO’s business, that humans have
to think about how they treat animals and how
they farm them, how they market them–basically
the whole relationship between the animal kingdom
and the human kingdom.”
WHO and the FAO are parallel entities
established under U.N. auspices, and often work
together in combating epidemics.

EU adopts transport limit

April 1, 2004 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2004:

BRUSSELS–The European Parliament on March 30, 2004 endorsed
a nine-hour limit on how long animals may be trucked en route to
slaughter.
“It is now up to the Agriculture Council,” now headed by
Ireland, “to finalize the regulation,” said the Eurogroup for
Animal Welfare in a prepared statement.
The nine-hour recommendation was introduced in July 2003 with
the backing of Eurogroup, a consortium representing numerous leading
animal welfare organizations.
“Compassion in World Farming welcomes today’s vote,”
commented CIWF president Joyce D’Silva. “However CIWF still has
grave concerns about the exclusion of animals destined for further
fattening from this limit and the lack of provision for these animals
to rest off the vehicle.”
The nine-hour limit was approved three weeks after the
European Parliament on March 9 voted 287-194 to include animal
welfare considerations in proposed improvements to the European Union
food safety standards.

Asian H5N1 pandemic rages on–worst ever factory farm disaster

March 1, 2004 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

BANGKOK, BEIJING, JAKARTA–United
Nations Food & Agricultural Organization chief
Jacques Diouf on February 25 opened an emergency
meeting in Bangkok of experts from 23 nations
with a warning that the H5N1 avian flu pandemic
sweeping Southeast Asia in recent months is not
yet under control. Diouf urgently appealed for
economic help from other parts of the world.
Fear that H5N1 could quickly mutate into a
virulent human form was heightened on February 19
when Thai scientists confirmed that the disease
had killed 14 of 15 housecats kept by one family
who had seen one of the cats scavenging a dead
chicken. All of the cats fell ill, but one
recovered.
Further investigation determined,
however, that H5N1 had apparently not mutated
before killing the cats. In the avian form,
H5N1 kills about 70% of the humans it attacks,
but it apparently does not cross easily into
humans, and attacks mainly children, who have
had less time to develop a spectrum of immunities
to flu viruses.

Editorial: Factory farming toll rises in Asia

March 1, 2004 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

“We are preparing to campaign against burying birds with
influenza alive,” Voice-4-Animals founder Changkil Park e-mailed
from Seoul, South Korea, as the winter avian flu pandemic peaked,
and frantic officials and poultry workers struggled to contain it by
killing all the birds believed to be at risk. “I hope animal people
will have some ideas for us about how animal advocates should view
the massive inhumane treatment of birds,” Changkil Park added,
seeming to speak for thousands whose feelings ranged from shock to
despair.
Finding any good in the often unspeakably cruel culling of
more than 100 million chickens and other birds is admittedly
difficult.
The World Bank has pledged to finance rebuilding the
Southeast Asian poultry industry, moreover, which will probably
mean even more intensive promotion of factory farm methods in the
very near future. If Southeast Asian egg producers adopt the routine
live maceration or burial of “spent” hens that has become standard in
U.S. agribusiness, described elsewhere in this edition, the World
Bank involvement may help to institutionalize some of the cruelty
that is now horrifying television news viewers throughout the world.

How the U.S. kills sick & “spent” chickens

March 1, 2004 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

SAN DIEGO–Calls to television stations
and letters to newspapers indicate that Americans
were mostly shocked by coverage of live burial
and sometimes live incineration of chickens in
Souteast Asia to stop the spread of avian flu
H5N1–but live burial of chickens is also common
here, to dispose of “spent” hens and surplus
male chicks from laying hen “factories.”
The U.S. egg industry kills about 170
million spent hens and as many as 235 million
male chicks per year. In 2002 about 111 million
spent hens were killed in U.S. and Canadian
slaughterhouses. Nearly 59 million hens, along
with the male chicks, were killed by other
means. That number is expected to increase by
about 21 million in 2004, warned Poultry Times
writer Barbara Olenik in September 2003.
“The USDA purchased approximately 30
million spent hens a year through their canned
boned and diced chicken purchase programs,
making it the largest market for spent hens,”
Olenick explained. “However, in July 2003 the
USDA announced new specifications that fowl
producers must meetŠdue to complaints of bone
fragments and injuries to consumers in the
National School Lunch Program.”

Activist “trespassers” fined $1.00 each

March 1, 2004 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

MUNCIE, Indiana–Apologizing to Ball State University
professor Abel Alves and artist Carol Blakney, his wife, Judge
Wayne Lennington of the Delaware Circuit Court in Muncie, Indiana on
February 24, 2004 fined them each $1.00 for trespassing and released
them without further conditions.
A jury earlier convicted Alves and Blakney of trespassing,
for briefly viewing the Seldom Rest hog farm from a roadside in
October 2002.
“Lennington said he couldn’t call the jury’s decision to
convict ‘despicable.’ But he indicated that is how he felt,” wrote
Seth Stabaugh of the Muncie Star Press.
“Several months before being accused of trespassing,”
Stabaugh explained, “Blakney filed a complaint against Seldom Rest
with the Indiana Department of Environmental Management. IDEM accused
[owner] Kaye Whitehead of housing pigs in an unpermitted structure,”
and of allowing manure to pollute a creek. Whitehead corrected the
alleged violations, but is believed to have pursued the trespassing
charges in retaliation.
Whitehead chairs the Delaware County Farm Bureau and the
Delaware County Republican Party. Prosecutor Judy Calhoun is
daughter of a Randolph County farmer and cousin of a Randolph County
Farm Bureau official, Stabaugh wrote.

Australia escapes H5N1–officially

March 1, 2004 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

MELBOURNE–Australia has avoided H5N1 and other avian flu
outbreaks, so far, but has had some recent scares.
“Our rescue team did a big broiler chicken rescue in
January,” Patty Mark of Animal Liberation Victoria told ANIMAL
PEOPLE. “We got 55 birds out,” 40 of them later euthanized due to
illness and injury, “and there were masses of dead bodies in the
shed,” Mark recounted. “All the dead birds we witnessed were
unusual. We thought this guy was just a bad operator and failed to
collect them daily, as some were very rotten. One TV station
grabbed an exclusive on the story,” Mark said, “then sat on it for
two weeks when avian flu hit [in Southeast Asia] and then dropped it.”
Most of the Animal Liberation Victoria rescuers were older
than typical H5N1 victims, who tend to be under 20.
However, said Mark, “Seven out of nine of us on that rescue
had the usual sore throat, sinus problems, and sore eyes
afterward,” from the filthy air they breathe inside poultry barns.

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