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Away from care2
Oct 17, 2006
Dear friends, thank you for the stars that you continue sending even though I've hardly come back to care2.com anymore.

I've had to stay away because of work - the work that keeps food on the table, and the work that we do for the homeless cats - Trap-Neuter-Release Management (TNRM).

I may not stick around much but that doesn't mean we can't keep in touch. We are documenting our TNRM work via a blog - Tipped Ear Clan. I'm posting there as calsifer. Do say "Hi" if you drop by.
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Posted: Oct 17, 2006 1:53am
Help save this nurse shark from its Singapore prison of 5 years now!
Mar 10, 2006
Focus: Animal Welfare
Action Request: Petition
Location: Singapore
Please sign this petition: Save the sharks at Parc Palais

I've previously written about a a 1.7m nurse shark which has been kept in a condominium tank only 2m wide, for the past FIVE YEARS, with two reef sharks as companion prisoners.  ( Alert: Singapore: Sharks kept as pets in dismal conditions, authorities no action )

Now the authorities, AVA, have adviced the private property managers to release the 2 reef sharks, but see no need to release the nurse shark. The incredible rationale?? "We would like to reassure Ms Lee that the nurse shark at the Parc Palais condominium is provided with adequate space and care in a captive environment. Nurse sharks are sluggish in nature. Black tip reef sharks, on the other hand, are more active"

We need to pressure the authorities to advise the private proerty to release the nurse shark and to tighten legislation so that sharks aren't sold! Please sign the petition!

Details can be read here: OK to keep pet shark without a licence?

In an interesting side-development, the local welfare organisation that spear-headed the investigation and call for the sharks' release, ACRES,  has suddenly been told by the authorities that they have to vacate their current office - which was provided free of charge by a pet-hotel. This is what ACRES said about the situation: "Over the past half a year, Mutts and Mittens have provided us a free office space at their pet hotel. AVA visited Mutts and Mittens this week and we’ve been informed that we are not allowed to have our office here. The land belongs to AVA and they have told Mutts and Mittens that they are not allowed to sublet it to Acres. Mutts and Mittens is merely providing us an office space and we do not pay rent. We moved here with approval from the Registry of Societies and had informed all the relevant authorities and in fact had to pay a fee for the approval. We are now awaiting the official letter from AVA. I leave you to decide why AVA has suddenly asked us to leave." Details here: Urgent call for help: Acres asked to leave office 



Please cross-post widely! Thank you!
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Posted: Mar 10, 2006 4:45am
DawnWatch: New York Times on Anna Wintour fur protests 2/27/06
Feb 27, 2006
Focus: Animal Welfare
Action Request: Various
Location: United States
Please read, think about, and write letters to the NYTimes.

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: DawnWatch: New York Times on Anna Wintour fur protests 2/27/06
From:    "DawnWatch" <news@dawnwatch.com>
Date:    Mon, February 27, 2006 5:15 pm

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

In the Monday, February 27, New York Times, Guy Trebay's "Fashion Diary" focuses on actions against Vogue Magazine editor Anna Wintor. (Pg B 8.) She has been pelted with various substances, such as flour or red paint, many times.
 

Trebay writes:
Protesters may have valid points about the horrors of factory farming and the need for at least the humane means of slaughter that the academic and behaviorist Temple Grandin writes about. But Robert's Rules of Order are a far cry from the methodology of those who routinely mess with Ms. Wintour.
 

"With her editorial clout and unabashed taste for luxurious pelts, Ms. Wintour may be the public face of the fur consumer. But in Milan, a city where horse meat is not a rarity in restaurants and where at least one fashion vendor sets up shop during Fashion Week to sell jackets he touts as made from baby elephant hides, why pick on her?"

In calling Wintour the "Public face of the fur consumer" he seems to have answered his own question.


It presents a great opportunity for letters to the editor about the fur industry. The website www.FurIsDead.com is a great source of information. I urge anybody who has never been to that site and watched some of the footage posted there to check it out.

The New York Times takes letters at letters@nytimes.com

Always include your full name, address, and daytime phone number when sending a letter to the editor. Shorter letters are more likely to be published.

Yours and the animals',
Karen Dawn

(DawnWatch is an animal advocacy media watch that looks at animal issues in the media and facilitates one-click responses to the relevant media outlets. You can learn more about it, and sign up for alerts at http://www.DawnWatch.com. To unsubscribe, go to  http://www.dawnwatch.com/cgi-bin/dada/dawnwatch_unsubscribe.cgi  If you forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts, please do so unedited -- leave DawnWatch in the title and include this tag line.)




Why She's the No. 1 Target in the Glamour Business

By GUY TREBAY
Published: February 27, 2006

Milan



As a microcosm, fashion occasionally finds itself in step with the larger world, where terrorism seems to be the default strategy for conflict resolution. It may strike some as trivial or humorous when the Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour — so often caricatured as some kind of Mme. Satan in an astrakhan wrap — gets a pie in the face from activists, who profess to be standing up for oppressed chinchillas. But does violence ever have subtle shadings?


Protesters may have valid points about the horrors of factory farming and the need for at least the humane means of slaughter that the academic and behaviorist Temple Grandin writes about. But Robert's Rules of Order are a far cry from the methodology of those who routinely mess with Ms. Wintour.


With her editorial clout and unabashed taste for luxurious pelts, Ms. Wintour may be the public face of the fur consumer. But in Milan, a city where horse meat is not a rarity in restaurants and where at least one fashion vendor sets up shop during Fashion Week to sell jackets he touts as made from baby elephant hides, why pick on her?


Ms. Wintour has been physically attacked so often "I've lost count," she said last week. Three days later an activist outside the Dolce & Gabbana show nailed her with a flour bomb.


She has taken more projectiles to the face than a clown at a Kiwanis carnival. Last season outside the Chloé show at the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris a woman ran up to Ms. Wintour and slammed her with some bloody matter packed into a pie tin.

What is it about Ms. Wintour that makes her such a hostility magnet that she has to go everywhere with bodyguards? Why choose this person when half the population of Milan wraps up like extras from "Conan the Barbarian" the minute the mercury dips below 50 degrees? It cannot only be the influence she wields or that she is a powerful woman or even an identifiable target.


"You would be surprised at the number of people in the industry who have had Anna Wintour dreams," said Ed Filipowski, one of the principals at KCD, the powerful public relations and production company.


Mr. Filipowski may be onto something. Could it be that, like another sphinx celebrity, Andy Warhol, Ms. Wintour has perfected a public facade so blank that she makes the ideal screen on which to project almost anything. (Did Valerie Solanas honestly think shooting Warhol would advance the agenda of her one-lunatic cause, the Society for Cutting Up Men?) The thought is scary, but Ms. Wintour may just have attained a creepy, Warholian level of fame.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/27/fashion/shows/27DIARY.html



Ref shares: Tibetans burn wild animal skins in Tibet to encourage wildlife preservation , FUR: Cats are being farmed in EUROPE too... will activists call for a boycott of European goods??
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Posted: Feb 27, 2006 10:20pm
Singapore: Sharks kept as pets in dismal conditions, authorities no action
Feb 24, 2006
Focus: Animal Welfare
Action Request: Various
Location: Singapore
On Thursday, 23 Feb, the local news media ran a story about how a 1.7m nurse shark has been kept in a condominium tank only 2m wide, for the past FIVE YEARS. Two reef sharks are its companion prisoners. And yet, the authorities are choosing inaction, their habitual response. Please read, and think about this. If you are able to, please consider writing to the local press too. Email address included below

Thank you.

The article: OK to keep pet shark without a licence?

The letter writing effort, and letters printed thus far:  “Please help this POOR Shark!"


The newspaper's daily publication can found online at http://www.todayonline.com

Letters can be sent to news@newstoday.com.sg
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Posted: Feb 24, 2006 3:43pm
RAINFOREST ALERT: Oil Palm/OrangutanThreat Major Issue
Feb 23, 2006
Focus: Endangered Species
Action Request: Various
Location: Indonesia
The Orang Utans of Indonesia, and their habitat are in serious danger.. can you imagine the already endangered Orangs facing more threats? Please help the Orangs and save the Rainforests.

Please also consider signing up for ecological internet alerts: visit here:
http://www.ecoearth.info/subscribe/ or send a blank email to join-ecological_internet@ecoearth.info
 
From: "GlenBarry@EcologicalInternet.org" <GlenBarry@EcologicalInternet.org>
Sent: Wed, 22 Feb 2006 07:16:44 -0600

Subject: RAINFOREST ALERT UPDATE: Oil Palm/Orangutan Threat Major Issue

PLEASE SEND & FORWARD ORANGUTAN ALERT AGAIN, NEW TARGET

LIST UPDATE: Clearly we are making Indonesian oil palm's threat to rainforests and orangutans a major issue. I have never seen such a massive response to an alert, as our orangutan conservation friends have swelled our ranks. Our tens of thousands of protest
emails have caused the Indonesian government to close the Prime Minister's public email account. We are reissuing the alert, addressing it now to the Minister of Agriculture whose department is the prime proponent of the project. We have also added over a dozen new email addresses. Send and forward the
alert again, expressing outrage at the wholesale clearance of this pristine rainforest wilderness for plantation agriculture.
g.b.

---------------------------

ACTION ALERT                                   FORWARD WIDELY!

Oil Palm Threatens Indonesia's Rainforests and Orangutans

By Rainforest Portal, project of Ecological Internet, Inc.

http://www.rainforestportal.org/
February 20, 2006

TAKE ACTION

Chinese funded development a ploy to access rainforest timbers, will devastate Borneo's biodiversity and largest remaining wild orangutan population
 
  http://www.rainforestportal.org/alerts/send.asp?id=indonesia

Indonesia plans to cut a 2,000 kilometer long, five kilometer wide swathe through one of the world's largest remaining areas of pristine rainforest to create a massive oil palm plantation.

The project would destroy nearly two million hectares of ancient rainforest in Kalimantan, traversing almost the entire border with Malaysia, and slicing through three national parks. These remote rainforests on the island of Borneo are home to countless species of rare birds, plants and mammals including the largest remaining wild orangutan population. This Chinese-funded "agricultural development" is almost certainly a thinly veiled
ruse to access timber. Indonesia has huge land areas of abandoned, unproductive palm oil plantations and degraded forest areas that would be suitable for oil palm development. Palm oil plantations - which completely clear the rainforests and are biologically depauperate - are the number one enemy of orangutans. Orangutans need vast areas of interconnected forest
to survive, and this ill-conceived project would speed up their extinction. The business as usual palm oil trade is expected to cause the extinction of the orangutan within 12 years. Let the Minister of Agriculture know he must cancel the Kalimantan
project, and that new oil palm plantations should be built only in previously cleared and unused areas.

Note your protest emails are going to a sixteen addresses, so please inform us if some start to bounce (due to closure, etc.). Please take action now
at http://www.rainforestportal.org/alerts/send.asp?id=indonesia

---


To subscribe, send a blank email to join-ecological_internet@ecoearth.info
Or visit here:
http://www.ecoearth.info/subscribe/
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Posted: Feb 23, 2006 7:32am
Canada: An ivory trade to call our own (Seal-hunt); Britain condemns seal clubbing
Feb 23, 2006
Focus: Endangered Species
Action Request: Various
Location: Canada
 Please think about this issue and the thoughts expressed in the editorial attached. Canadians, please also write to the newspaper voicing your opinion.

Sign for seashepherd alerts on http://seashepherd.org/: Click on the "Join List" button on the left scroll bar

(Source: http://seashepherd.org/news/media_060219_1.html)


02/19/2006printer-friendly version

Canadian National Newspaper Editorial Condemns the Canadian Seal Slaughter

Canada's conservative national newspaper the National Post ran an editorial by former Presidential speech writer Matthew Scully that eloquently eviscerated the idea that there is anything traditional or honourable about the annual Canadian seal slaughter.  Sea Shepherd Conservation Society heartedly applauds both Mr. Scully for the literary lethality of his words in describing the slaughter for what it is – an embarrassment and a disgrace to Canada's international image. We also applaud the National Post for having the courage to run the article and for rejecting the Canadian government's pressure to stifle the media on covering the annual massacre of young seals.

This editorial is yet another nail to be hammered into the coffin of this despicable, obscene, and barbaric industry. The sealing industry is on the ropes now and is being pummeled with boycotts, national bans on pelts, protests, confrontations, and condemnations from celebrities and on the floor of the British House of Parliament.

This bloody cruel slaughter has already decimated harp seal populations, destroyed the cod fishery, and has caused irreparable ecological damage to the entire Northwest region of the North Atlantic Ocean.


Sea Shepherd has been fighting this horrific killing of young harp and hood seals since we were first founded in 1977. We have never retreated from our opposition to the killing and we never will. Saving these seals has been worth the beatings inflicted upon us, it has been worth the arrests and the imprisonment for the "crime" of documenting the killing, and it has been worth the expensive efforts to continually go to the ice floes to intervene against the killing of the seals.


Together, all of the organizations and individuals opposing the slaughter of the seals will prevail. This annual massacre of hundreds of thousands of newly born seals will be shut down. We will never rest until it is ended forever.



http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/issuesideas/story.html?id=a37b5349-b145-43aa-ada6-a892dfeb1d08
An ivory trade to call our own

by Matthew Scully, National Post

Published: Monday, February 13, 2006

Forming right now inside their mothers, seal pups will soon fill the ice floes off Newfoundland and Labrador. Then comes one of their very first sights on this Earth -- the swarms of men bearing clubs, hooks, guns, and knives. Welcome to the world.

Nature has its own ruthless ways, as those men like to remind us, and makes no special allowance for the young and helpless. But this annual killing binge is not of nature's design, and there has always been something uniquely abhorrent in the spectacle.

If we could understand what possesses people to do such things, and do it all with such smug self-assurance, the insight would have relevance far beyond Atlantic Canada. Their professed reasons - the marginal economic benefits of the hunt, the protection of an ancient "way of life," etc. - have never really explained it. When you've dispensed with all their excuse-making, it becomes clear we are dealing here with some deep and implacable force.

Cruelty is the endpoint of greed and other vices, and rarely done for its own sake. Yet in every age and every place, there is a certain type of man who glories in violence -- only more when the victims are helpless and innocent. There is "a cruelty that is fed, not weakened, by tears," as a long-ago philosopher observed. Whether this malevolence directs itself at humans or at animals, it all comes from the same rot, the same dark and unreachable place in the human heart.

I was struck last year by a letter to this paper from one seal-pup slaughterer who took offense at my use of "innocence." The word springs naturally enough to mind when one is attempting to describe newborn mammals left defenseless on the ice floes that are their nursery, creatures so new to the world they cannot swim and can barely crawl. But you can understand why someone who clubs, shoots, or skins alive hundreds of such creatures in an afternoon would find the term uncomfortable.

Twenty or so centuries' worth of Western literature and religious allusion has looked to young animals as the very embodiments of vulnerability and innocence, as in the Lamb who suffered for the sins of the world. And there is no reason to shy from plain moral language here as well. That same tradition left us with an abundance of other ideas such as humility before Creation, the moral restraint of the strong toward the weak, and the spirit of mercy that extends even to humble animals - ideas readily grasped by all except the perverse hard of heart.

There is a passage in The Heart of Darkness that has a familiar ring. If you substitute "sealskin" for "ivory," Joseph Conrad could be reporting directly from the ice floes: "The word ivory rang in the air, was whispered and sighed. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew threw it all, like a whiff from some corpse ... and outside, the silent wilderness surrounding this cleared speck of the earth struck me as something great and invisible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion."

A harsh but truthful portrait of the type -- of men who think that every last thing on Earth is there for the taking, and traipse about as if their only business in this world is to allocate death.

More than anything else, what really amazes me about the seal-pup slaughter is the stubborn pridefulness of it: Let all the world think they are callous fools. Let nation after nation slam the doors on their stolen products, as Greenland, Denmark, and Italy have done in recent days. Let a worldwide boycott of Canadian fishery products destroy the markets and jobs of other people. For these folks, all of this is only more reason to set course toward the seal nurseries.

They talk a lot about traditional values and the like, as opposed to modern, "urban" values, and you wonder how many of these characters still like to think of themselves as good Christian men. Maybe by now, as I am told by witnesses to the mayhem, the pretenses have all pretty well fallen away. We can be certain, in any case, that even when the cameras are barred and the protesters kept away, no cruelty goes unrecorded, and no forsaken creature's whimper is beyond His hearing. If the Good Shepherd does indeed watch over those scenes, I would not want to be wearing their bloody boots.

Recall, too, that all of this cruelty is subsidized, propped up by millions of dollars a year from Canada's taxpayers. Yet all arguments were lost last time around on Prime Minister Paul Martin. Even to the very end, he could be heard pandering in Atlantic Canada during last month's election with pledges to "save the seal hunt."

So let it be a Conservative government that finally brings the wretched business to an end. It would be a fitting start for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a courageous and merciful exercise of his new powers.

And to a watching world, no decision of his could more dramatically demonstrate that corrupt old ways will no longer be tolerated, and a new day has truly arrived in Ottawa.

http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/issuesideas/story.html?id=a37b5349-b145-43aa-ada6-a892dfeb1d08

(source: http://seashepherd.org/news/media_060221_1.html)
02/21/2006printer-friendly version

Great Britain to Join the "Save the Seals" Camp

For those of us who wish to stop the obscene, cruel, and ecologically-destructive slaughter of seals on the East coast of Canada, we have just acquired a powerful new ally.

The British government is preparing to join Greenland, Denmark, and Italy in the campaign to ban seal products from Canada.

The London Times carried the story on February 17 under the heading "Britain Ready to Risk Rift on Seal Clubbing."


Sea Shepherd Conservation Society welcomes the support of Britain. The late British Labour Minister and member of Parliament Tony Banks was an ardent supporter of the seals and his party is rallying around his last wish to take action to end the horrific slaughter of seals in Canada each year.

The Canadian government has not yet set a quota or set an opening date for the seal slaughter. The seals are also threatened this year by the effects of global warming which has left the Gulf of St. Lawrence free of ice. The harp seals are dependent upon ice to give birth to their pups.  


 
 

The Times. 17 February 2006
Britain ready to risk rift on seal clubbing
By Philip Webster

MINISTERS are poised to risk a diplomatic rift with Canada by backing a ban on the import of seal products for fashion accessories.

Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, and Alan Johnson, the Trade Secretary, are understood to be sympathetic to calls for a ban because of international outrage over the slaughter of baby seals in Newfoundland.

Seal products are also used in the manufacture of sporrans. The United States has already banned the trade with Canada. The Canadian seal hunt, due to resume in six weeks, is the largest marine mammal cull in the world. The Government's readiness to act was signalled by Ian Pearson, the Trade Minister, in a debate this week. He said: "Seal-clubbing does the reputation of Canadians no good at all."

An intensive lobbying campaign is under way by MPs to persuade the Treasury and the Environment Department that a ban should be introduced. More than 315,000 seals were killed in March and April last year. An independent veterinary study of seal skulls found that more than 40 per cent had minimal or no fractures, suggesting that the animals were conscious when skinned. Kill levels today are twice as high as in the 1960s.





More noteworthy seal and other seasheperd marine campaign news here http://seashepherd.org/news.html
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Posted: Feb 23, 2006 6:55am
Help: Need data, stats, personal experience on cats living in apartments
Feb 23, 2006
Focus: Animal Welfare
Action Request: Other
Location: Singapore
Dear Friends, cat-lovers, and fellow care2 members,

Please help the cat-lovers of Singapore. Please let me know of data, stats, personal experience supporting the practise of cats living in apartments. Cats and their caregivers are being unreasonably persecuted by local regulations.

Can you imagine being told by your government that you can keep a dog, or any other pet but a cat?! This bizarre discrimination is happening in my country. Singapore has a population of 4.5 million, out of this, a whopping 90% are living in public housing, apartment blocks under the purview of the Housing Development Board or the HDB.

The board has a very archaic rule about petownership. Their 20-yr old rule states:
HDB has to consider the overall sentiments of the HDB residents when setting policies and rules. Not all residents like pets, or are comfortable with neighbours keeping pets.

HDB has allowed one dog of an approved breed to be kept in an HDB flat. The approved breeds of dogs are the smaller dogs which are generally more manageable. Please click here for the list of approved breeds of dogs. Cats are not allowed to be kept in HDB flats.

HDB also allows flat owners to keep other pet animals such as fish, hamsters, rabbits, birds, etc which generally do not cause nuisance to the neighbouring residents.
(http://www.hdb.gov.sg/fi10/fi10209p.nsf/WPDis/Keeping%20Of%20PetsOverview?OpenDocument)

Incredibly, and as you see, ludicrously, the reasons the HDB openly states for banning cats are nonsensical. This is a recent newspaper reply from HDB:
HDB won't allow cats in flats

The New Paper, Friday 10 Feb 2006

I refer to the letter "Why Is HDB Against Cats In Flats?" (The New Paper, 21 Jan).

We wish to explain that cats are not allowed to be kept in HDB flats as they are nomadic in nature and it is difficult to confine them to flats.

Cats can shed fur, dirty public places, make noise and cause disturbance.

Despite the prohibition on cats, HDB has been receiving from residents numerous complaints relating to cats.

As our priority is to promote a pleasant living environment and good relationships for all residents in our housing estates, HDB will maintain its existing policy on not allowing cats to be kept in the flats.We thank the writer for her feedback.

Mrs Foo-Ho Yoke Ming
Deputy Director (Branch Operations)
DID 64902250
Housing & Development Board

More details here: HDB's chronic misconception of cats


Background info: Blog: Primer: The situation for stray cats in Singapore
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Posted: Feb 23, 2006 6:22am
Seashepherd: Greenpeace abandoning whales, Japanese whale killing quota affected by seashepherd
Feb 22, 2006
Focus: Endangered Species
Action Request: Various
Location: Japan
Read these seashepherd conservation society articles about the Antarctic Whale Killing Season just concluded by the Japanese.

Please also consider signing up for seashepherd newsletters and alerts: scroll down on the home page and click on the button below the "Join our mailing list!" heading
"The Greenpeace Foundation has announced that they will not be returning to the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary in Antarctica for the 2006/2007 Japanese whaling season."

"Greenpeace is estimated to have spent over one million dollars in promotions over the recent campaign to Antarctica where Greenpeace crewmembers were filmed observing the slaughter of the whales.""

"Greenpeace had two ships in Antarctic waters including the Esperanza that had the speed capability of being able to stay constantly with the Japanese fleet."

"Instead, Greenpeace used it as a filming platform. Greenpeace also had a refueling ship to re-supply their two vessels. Despite this, the Greenpeace ships stayed only one week longer than Sea Shepherd and returned to Cape Town with plenty of fuel in their tanks."

""They had enough fuel left onboard to have stayed with the Japanese fleet for another two weeks. When we arrived in Cape Town after a voyage of 8,500 miles we had only a day’s supply of fuel remaining. ""

"
Greenpeace also refused to cooperate with Sea Shepherd and refused to post their coordinates on their website to prevent Sea Shepherd from getting the information.


 “Greenpeace had the capability of helping us to stop the whalers, “said Farley Mowat 1st Officer Alex Cornelissen. “They knew that the whalers stopped whaling and ran every time the Farley Mowat approached.  Instead, they allowed dozens of whales to die that could have been saved.”   


The much slower Farley Mowat was able to intercept the Japanese fleet three times and each time, the Japanese ships ran. In total, the whalers fled over 4,000 miles and it cost them 15 days of whaling.


 “Greenpeace is taking credit for this,” said Captain Watson. “Despite the fact that the whalers killed whales as Greenpeace watched."

""As far as I’m concerned, they used the whales to raise money and that money should be spent on returning to Antarctica and not for purposes other than what people donated it for.”"

"“If we can match their speed, we can shut them down.” said Captain Paul Watson. “If people are sincere about stopping these outlaw whalers, then we invite them to help us raise the funds to purchase the ship needed to do the job."

"Sea Shepherd cannot compete with the expensive ad campaigns and direct mail operations of Greenpeace. Despite this, it will be a Sea Shepherd ship confronting the whalers in 2006/2007 and not Greenpeace."




""Every time we approached them, they ran. We kept them running for 4,000 miles and 15 days," captain and activist Paul Watson told Reuters from the deck of his black steel ship.

"We couldn't catch them, so it was constantly a hit-and-ambush type of thing," he says, proudly recounting tales of the whalers he has helped to sink and the damage caused to those that escaped. "

""We don't injure anyone (but) we do damage property, property that has been used for illegal activity. We confiscate long-lines, we confiscate drift nets, we intercept poachers and we have sunk whaling ships.""

"Despite international disapproval, Japan announced plans last June to double its annual catch of minke whales to 850. It also has a quota of 10 fin whales, the second biggest member of the family after the blue whale.

Last month, after the clashes with the Farley Mowat and two Greenpeace ships in the Southern Ocean, an official at Japan's Fisheries Ministry said the confrontation would not halt Japan's whaling program, but could reduce the size of the catch. "

""I know when I am being harassed. It seems to me that Japan is pulling some strings around here," said Watson.

""I can virtually guarantee shutting down their operations if I can get a ship that can keep up with them."""


Please click here to access more of seashepherd's insightful articles, namely the titles featured as below:

  • 02/07/06 | New Captain of the Farley Mowat – Alex Cornelissen
  • 02/06/06 | Sea Shepherd to Take South African Bureaucrats to Court
  • 02/06/06 | Antarctic Whale Defense Campaign Update
  • 02/06/06 | Creative Captivity in Cape Town
  • 02/01/06 | "Slaughter Stalker" – Captain Watson's Article Printed in the Guardian Online
  • 01/30/06 | Sea Shepherds in Bureaucratland – The Farley Mowat Struggles with the Slime of Red Tape in Cape Town
  • 01/25/06 | How Many More Whales Must Japan Kill to Find Out What They Already Know They Eat?
  • 01/24/06 | Sea Shepherd Whale Defenders Arrive in South Africa to be Featured in a Major Motion Picture
  • 01/23/06 | Fifty Days at Sea for the Whales
  • 01/21/06 | Greenpeace Ends Antarctic Whale Campaign
  • 01/20/06 | Farley Mowat Out of the Danger Zone – Headed for Cape Town
  • 01/19/06 | 17 Nations Denounce Japanese Whaling Activities in the Southern Oceans
  • 01/16/06 | Australian Broadcasting Corporation Report on the Whaling Controversy in the Southern Oceans
  • 01/16/06 | Sea Shepherd Forced to Retreat from Whaling Grounds for Fuel
  • 01/15/06 | Taking Guidance from Martin Luther King
  • 01/13/06 | Sea Shepherd Willing to Withdraw in Return for Action from Governments
  • 01/12/06 | Confrontations Are Impacting the Japanese Quota
  • 01/11/06 | Sea Shepherd Continues to Pursue Pirate Whalers - No Whales killed for the Last Three Days
  • 01/09/06 | Japanese Whaling Fleet on the Run Again – 48 Hours Without Whaling
  • 01/08/06 | Sea Shepherd Sideswipes Japanese Whaling Supply Ship
  • 01/07/06 | Sea Shepherd Scares Off Japanese Whaling Fleet
  • 01/04/06 | Update from the Farley Mowat in Antarctic Waters - 11 Days No Whales Killed
  • 01/03/06 | More Wrong off the Press – Sea Shepherd Demands an Apology and a Retraction from Het Nieuwsblad and the Guardian Newspapers
  • 01/03/06 | Japanese Fleet Once Again Violates the Antarctic Treaty
  • 01/02/06 | Wrong Off the Press - Sea Shepherd Corrects Guardian UK Article
  • 01/01/06 | Update from the Farley Mowat – Somewhere Off the Coast of Antarctica
  • 12/30/05 | Report from the Farley Mowat with Letter to Australian Senator
  • 12/29/05 | Japanese Warship Enroute to Defend Whalers?
  • 12/28/05 | Confessions of a Modern Southern Oceans Pirate
  • 12/27/05 | Captain Paul Watson Responds to the Director-General of the Japanese Institute of Cetacean Research
  • 12/24/05 | Merry Christmas to the Greenpeace crew from the Sea Shepherd Crew
  • 12/24/05 | Sea Shepherd Intercepts Japanese Whaling Fleet
  • 12/24/05 | The Whaling Debate Heats Up in Antarctica
  • 12/23/05 | Cowardly Pirate Whalers Flee from the Whaling Grounds – The Sea Shepherd ship is in Hot Pursuit
  • 12/22/05 | Sea Shepherd Calls on Australia to Uphold the Law
  • 12/18/05 | Voyage of the Sea Shepherd ship - In Search of Outlaw Killers in a Sanctuary for Whales
  • 12/06/05 | Reward Offered for Location of Illegal Japanese Whaling Vessels
  • 12/06/05 | Whale Killers and Whale Defenders on a Collision Course

Source: seashepherd conservation society, articles about the Antartic Whale Killing Season just concluded by the Japanese.

Please also consider signing up for seashepherd newsletters and alerts: scroll down on the home page and click on the button below the "Join our mailing list!" heading
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Posted: Feb 22, 2006 12:54am
DawnWatch: HBO's Dealing Dogs makes news in other major media 2/21/06
Feb 22, 2006
Focus: Animal Welfare
Action Request: Various
Location: United States
Please read, reflect, and do what you can. Also, please consider signing up for dawnwatch alert at http://www.DawnWatch.com.
 
---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: DawnWatch: HBO's Dealing Dogs makes news in other major media 2/21/06
From:    "DawnWatch" <news@dawnwatch.com>
Date:    Tue, February 21, 2006 6:16 pm

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

The HBO documentary "Dealing Dogs" which premieres tonight, February 21, at 10pm ET/PT (see full schedule at  http://tinyurl.com/cukje) is making news throughout the major media. It was covered on CNN (by Anderson Cooper, of course) and is in today's New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and at least thirty other papers. And there is a particularly interesting piece, an interview with "Pete," the undercover investigator, on the Salon.com site.

The show and related coverage offer us wonderful opportunities for discussions about vivisection on letters to the editor pages.

The New York Times piece, on the cover of the Arts section (Pg E1) is headed "How Dogs Are Abused In a Scheme For Profit."
It tells us
"'Dealing Dogs,' a film to be broadcast tonight on HBO, documents the project that was designed to expose the kennel's inhumane treatment of dogs and violations of the law. The investigation was initiated by Last Chance for Animals, a Los Angeles-based animal-rights group...

More here: DawnWatch: HBO's Dealing Dogs makes news in other major media 2/21/06

(DawnWatch is an animal advocacy media watch that looks at animal issues in the media and facilitates one-click responses to the relevant media outlets. You can learn more about it, and sign up for alerts at http://www.DawnWatch.com.  If you forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts, please do so unedited -- leave DawnWatch in the title and include this tag line.)
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Posted: Feb 22, 2006 12:14am
US: A Sunless Hell (Factory Farming)
Feb 19, 2006
Focus: Animal Welfare
Action Request: Various
Location: Arizona, United States
Please reflect, and take action accordingly.

Also, please consider signing up for DawnWatch alerts: http://www.DawnWatch.com

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: DawnWatch: Terrific piece against factory farming by Matthew Scully in AZ Republic -- 2/19/06
From:    "DawnWatch" <news@dawnwatch.com>
Date:    Sun, February 19, 2006 7:10 pm

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Matthew Scully has a beautiful op-ed in the Sunday, February 19, Arizona Republic. It is written specifically in support of a ballot measure that would ban sow gestation and veal crates in that state, but it reads as a strong indictment of factory farming. It is on line at http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/viewpoints/articles/0219scully0219.html and I will paste the article below, encouraging people to read the whole piece and forward it widely.  Supportive letters, particularly needed from those in Arizona, should be submitted at http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/opinions/sendaletter.html


Here is Scully's piece:


A sunless hell
Confronting the cruel facts of factory-farmed meat


Matthew Scully

Special for the Republic

Arizona voters will be asked this fall to weigh in on a ballot measure called the Humane Treatment of Farm Animals Act, which is now in the signature-gathering stage but, by November, is certain to be one of our livelier election-year debates.

The initiative, modeled on a reform passed by Florida voters, would prohibit the factory-farming practice of confining pigs and veal calves in crates so small that the animals cannot even turn around or extend their limbs.

Factory farming, in general, is no one's favorite subject, and the details here are particularly unpleasant to think about: masses of creatures enduring lives of unrelieved confinement and deprivation. But if you're in need of reasons to sign the petitions and vote for the initiative, they are easy to find, and our discomfort with the subject is a good place to start.

Known in the trade as "intensive confinement" or "mass confinement," it sounds pretty rough. And as we're seeing already, pork producers and the PR firms in their hire do not take well to criticism of what they regard as "standard practice."

Just this month, the industry's allies in the Arizona Legislature proposed a constitutional amendment to bar the public from passing any laws promoting the humane treatment of farm animals, effective Jan. 1, 2006. Nice to have a fallback position: Even if the humane-farming initiative passes by vote of the people, as industry lobbyists apparently fear it will, they plan to nullify the law retroactively.


Basically, pork producers figured out some years ago that if they packed the maximum number of pigs into the minimum amount of space, if they pinned the creatures down into fit-to-size iron crates above slatted floors and carved out giant "lagoons" to contain the manure - if they turned the "farm," in short, into a sunless hell of metal and concrete - it made everything so much more efficient. An obvious cost-saver, and from the industry's standpoint, that should settle the matter.


Veal, by definition, is the product of a sick, anemic, deliberately malnourished calf, a newborn dragged away from his mother in the first hours of life. Veal calves are dealt the harshest of punishments for the least essential of meats. And if you think people can get too sentimental about animals, try listening sometime to chefs and gourmands going on about the "velvety smooth succulence" of their favorite fare.

"Cost-saver" in industrial livestock agriculture may usually be taken to mean "moral shortcut." For all of its "science-based" pretensions, factory farming is really just an elaborate, endless series of evasions from the most elementary duties of honest animal husbandry. Man, the rationalizing creature, can justify just about anything when there is money in sight. It's only easier when your victims are so completely out of sight and unable to speak for themselves.

Over the years, one miserly deprivation led to another, ever harsher methods were applied to force costs lower and lower, and so on until the animals ceased to be understood as living creatures at all. Pigs, for example, aren't even "raised" anymore, a term that once conveyed some human attention and care. These days, in America's 395,000-kills-per-day pork industry, pigs are "grown," crowded together by the hundreds in the automated, scientifically based intensive-confinement facilities formerly known as barns.

Unlike the old ways

To the factory farmer, in contrast to the traditional farmer with his sense of honor and obligation, the animals are "production units," and accorded all the sympathy that term suggests. As conservative commentator Fred Barnes put it in the Wall Street Journal, "On the old family farms, pigs and cattle and chickens were raised for food, but they were free for a time; they mated, raised piglets, calves and chicks and were protected by the farmers . . . . They had a life. On industrial farms, they don't."

Among the more disreputable claims made to justify intensive confinement is that it's actually for the benefit of the pigs. They "prefer" confinement to grazing outdoors. They need "protection" from each other's aggression.

If you know absolutely nothing about pigs, this has a vaguely comforting ring to it - that is, until the moment you step into a factory farm, as I have had occasion to do. Inside, it becomes dramatically obvious that their ceaseless, merciless confinement is the cause of the pigs' aggression, and by no stretch a protective measure. It turns out that when you trap intelligent, 400- to 500-pound mammals in gestation crates 22 inches wide and 7 feet long, when their limbs are broken from trying to turn or escape and they are covered in sores, blood, tumors, "pus pockets," and their own urine and excrement, they tend to act up a bit.

Indeed, the most notable thing is how the appearance of any human being causes a violent panic. A mere opening of the door brings on a horrific wave of roars, squeals and cage-rattling from the sows. Another memorable sight is the "cull pen," wherein each and every day, the dead or dying bodies of the weak are placed, the ones who expired from the sheer, unrelenting agony of it.

It takes a well-practiced dishonesty to insist with a straight face that intensive confinement is "for their own good," and almost as brazen is the libertarian case for factory farming, which may be summed up as "mind your own business." Along with this comes a haughty little reminder that we're all the beneficiaries of factory farming, and where do you think all that cheap meat comes from, and why don't we just be grateful and let them manage their own affairs?

The argument has a certain practical appeal, provided you forget that factory farming is propped up by tens of billions of dollars in annual federal subsidies, which are very definitely our business. Much as the immiserated animals are kept on four legs by hormones and antibiotics, the entire enterprise is sustained by those federal subsidies and billions more paid by government to repair industrial farming's immense collateral damage to land, water and air.

The illusion of consumer savings depends not only on unscrupulous corporate farmers, but also on complaisant citizens and blithely indifferent consumers who don't ask too many questions - least of all moral questions. And the industry wants to keep it that way. Just buy the "cheap" meat, forget the damned animals, and keep the subsidies coming.

Once the details are known, in short, it all becomes a very tough sell for factory farmers. And so far their quaint-sounding "Campaign for Arizona Farmers and Ranchers" (brought to you by the National Pork Producers Council and other agribusiness trade groups) is not going well.

Industry lobbyist Jim Klinker, now director of the Arizona Farm Bureau and lead spokesman against the humane-farming initiative, started things off with a blunt reminder that farm animals aren't pets, and so our sympathy for them is misplaced. "These people," Klinker told Tucson Weekly, "want these animals raised the same way we raise our dogs and cats. I think most people understand that's not how food is produced."

When you want people to harden their hearts, however, it's probably not such a good idea to invite comparisons between farm animals and dogs or cats. How would your dog react if you stuffed her into a crate in which she could not even stretch or turn around, and never let her out? No human attention or companionship with other animals. No bedding, straw to lie on. No single moment outdoors, ever, to feel the breeze or the warmth of the sun.

What if it were a dog?

Your dog, a being of intelligence and emotional capacities entirely comparable to those of a pig, would beg and wail and whimper and finally fall silent into a state of complete brokenness. And anyone who inflicted such tortures on that animal, no matter what excuses might be offered, would be guilty of a felony. If the creatures are comparable, and the conditions identical, and the suffering equal, how can the one be "standard practice" and the other a crime?


Next, in an interview with Arizona Capitol Times, Klinker tried out the "sentimentalist" line. The initiative, he scoffed, is based on "pure emotions" - as opposed to factory farming itself, which we are to assume is guided at every grim stage by the light of pure reason.

He followed up with a little warning that the Humane Treatment of Farm Animals Act is all the doing of "outsiders" anyway, by which he means various cranks, subversives, and social misfits who apparently are conspiring at this very moment to "impose the values of a vegetarian society on all Arizonans."

One problem here is that if Klinker is going to be our defender of true Arizona values against "outsiders," then he needs to hear from a broader range of outside opinion. And it may surprise him to learn that the problems of factory farming are becoming more apparent, and more abhorrent, to people of every political stripe.

When the conservative columnist George Will, for example, calls cruelty to animals "an intrinsic evil," citing the "pain-inflicting confinements and mutilations" of factory farming, you know it can no longer be shrugged off as the concern of a faint-hearted few.

Factory farming, Mr. Will observed in Newsweek not long ago, has become a "serious issue of public policy." And conservatives in particular, applying that uncompromising moral clarity on which they pride themselves, should not be afraid to call "vicious" things what they are.

Another conservative writer, Andrew Ferguson of Bloomberg News, challenged the "hyper-efficient agricultural economy" and "the cruel innovations the modern industrial farm depends upon." And Father Richard John Neuhaus, writing in the conservative National Review, expressed his disgust at "the horrors perpetuated against pigs on industrial farms," a matter "that warrants public and governmental attention."

Neuhaus could cite, if he needed further authority, Pope Benedict XVI, who has warned against the "degrading of living creatures to a commodity" entailed in factory farming. And Protestant Christians could hear a similar message from one of their own most respected figures, Charles Colson, the conservative evangelist who cautions that "When it comes to animal welfare today, Christians have allowed the secular world to set the agenda. ... We need to get involved in shaping laws that determine animal treatment. But first we must make it our business to find out how the ... cattle of the earth are treated on factory farms." Christians especially, declared Colson, "have a duty to prevent the needless torment of animals."

"Outsiders," all of them, but not to my knowledge collaborators in any effort to impose "the values of a vegetarian society" on Arizona. For Klinker and other lobbyists for factory farming, surely the lesson is that they should spend a little less time warning about other people's values, and a little more time examining their own.

It is true, as he reminds us, that other states have far larger "herds" than in Arizona's $40 million-a-year pork industry. But this is hardly a thought to put one's mind at rest. The same was also true, until recently, of Utah, now home to a sprawling network of nightmarish "mega-farms," all of them built and run by giant corporations like Smithfield Foods, the real outsiders in all of this.
The largest of these places, a sort of gulag for pigs, holds 1.3 million in confinement and produces more waste every year than metropolitan Los Angeles.

Why, Klinker wonders, enact a law here instead of in Iowa, North Carolina or Utah? Well, for starters, maybe Arizonans do not want to go the way of Utah. And in that case, now would be a good time to bar the door.

Prepare yourself to hear, in the coming months, these arguments and similar rubbish from industry lobbyists, their shill veterinarians, and anyone else they can trot out to make something pernicious and contemptible seem decent and praiseworthy. Then in the quiet of the voting booth ask yourself why any creature of God, however humble, should be made to endure the dark, lonely, tortured existence of the factory farm, and what kind of people build their fortunes upon such misery.


The answer will send an unequivocal message, to factory farmers here and to all concerned, that unbridled arrogance, bad faith, and rank cruelty are not Arizona values.


Matthew Scully worked for Arizona governors Mecham, Mofford, and Symington. A former special assistant and deputy director of speechwriting for President Bush, he is the author of "Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy."

(END OF SCULLY PIECE IN ARIZONA REPUBLIC)
--------------------------
(DawnWatch is an animal advocacy media watch that looks at animal issues in the media and facilitates one-click responses to the relevant media outlets. You can learn more about it, and sign up for alerts at http://www.DawnWatch.com. To unsubscribe, go to  http://www.dawnwatch.com/cgi-bin/dada/dawnwatch_unsubscribe.cgi  If you forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts please leave DawnWatch in the title and include this tag line.)
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