Spain’s Supreme Court has upheld a final ban on the torture of bulls during the cruel “Toro de la Vega”festival, following years of pressure from local Spanish groups, including PACMA, and PETA.
No young bull will ever again be stabbed to death by men with spears in the Castilla y León region of Spain.
Spain’s Supreme Court has upheld a ban on the torture of bulls for the brutalToro de la Vega festival in what has been hailed a victory for Spanish and international groups such as PACMA, CAS International and Humane Society International/Europe (HSI) who have worked together for years to achieve an end to this cruel spectacle.
The Toro de la Vega fiesta takes place in Tordesillas, in the Castilla y León region of Spain,each September, despite the fact almost three quarters (74 per cent) of Spanish citizens aged 16 to 65 oppose the bull fiesta.
During the barbaric event, spear-wielding men on horseback chase a bull out of the town and into the surrounding countryside. He is relentlessly pursued and stabbed with spears until he is cornered before being brutally stabbed to death.
Since 2016, the Toro de la Vega has involved a normal bull-run through the town, during which the animal is not killed in public.
In its appeal, the Tordesillas local council had argued that the legislation eliminated “the essence of the popular rite that gave rise to bullfighting.”(!!!) Another of the arguments stated that “40,000 fans” attended the event “compared to 100 animal activists.” (!!!) The council also argued that the death of the animal did not detract from its dignity, but rather enhanced it. The appeal claimed that there was no real justification to do away with the death of the bull.
Silvia Barquero, president of Spain’s animal-rights party PACMA, has spent years fighting for the prohibition of the torture and death of the bull in the Toro de la Vegafestival. She has welcomed the definitive abolition of a practice that her group believes “is not in accordance with the sensitivities of today’s society.” According to Barquero, the ruling is the first victory in the fight to end similar festivals related to bullfighting. Now, she explained, the “Toro de la Vega has become just another bull-run, one that we reject just like we do all the others.”
After receiving news of the ruling, the mayor of Tordesillas announced that the Town Hall had requested that its external legal services examine what “possibilities present themselves now.” This report will made available to the council that is formed after the upcoming municipal elections on May 26, says González Poncela, who will not be running again as mayor.
Speaking about the landmark decision, Dr Jo Swabe, Senior Director of Public Affairs for HSIsaid in a statement sent to Vegan Food & Living: “This is an important victory in the fight against the torture and killing of sentient animals for public entertainment. The Spanish Supreme Court has recognised that the mediaeval ‘tradition’ of allowing a terrified bull to be chased to exhaustion and then stabbed to death by a spear-wielding mob has no place in modern society.
We salute our Spanish colleagues who have fought against the backward attempts of Tordesillas Council to reverse an earlier decision to prohibit the public killing of the bull during the annual Toro de la Vega fiesta.”
This victory is part of a wider movement in Spain, as more and more people are speaking out against events in which bulls are tortured in the name of entertainment. To date, over 100 towns have banned bullfighting.
My comment: This bloodthirsty bull spectacle was recognized as a tourist attraction in 1980 and classified by the Government of Castile in 1999 as a traditional bullfight.
It is sadism, stupidity and ignorance of a people towards a sentient being, who is tortured not only from local tradition, but is presented as a tourist worthy attraction, culture of prehistoric man, for years the shame of Spain, that is Tordesillas, to which one recalls as a place where every year a legal lynching took place and therefore was called tradition!
Even these bloody bullfests are subsidized by the EU, alone 150 million euros flow directly and indirectly from Germany into the bullfighting industry, 600 million euros is the bloodthirsty Tauromafia, which plunges the European Union every year in the cash. This EU subsidy insanity feeds and preserves the bull mafia.
In a big win for animals, the U.S. government has reinstated rules to stop large purchases of wild horses and burros, protecting them from money-hungry “kill buyers” who want to ship them off to slaughter by the hundreds to turn a profit.
Under these protections, nobody may purchase more than four animals every 6 months, blocking the mass killing of horses at foreign slaughterhouses.
Hundreds of thousands of readers have signed LFT petitions or sent comments to the Bureau of Land Management to stop the slaughter of America’s wild horses, and other activists and organizations across the country are working hard to stop the killing. This new decision shows that our voices are being heard, and takes us one major step closer to stopping the slaughter for good.
However, the fight for wild horses and burros is not over, and we will not rest until the slaughter of these majestic animals is banned completely.
There is hope: a bipartisan bill recently reintroduced to Congress, called the Safeguard American Food Exports (SAFE) Act, H.R. 961, would completely halt the transport of wild and domestic American horses and burros overseas for slaughter. Speak out to help this ban pass!
Sign the petition to ban all slaughter of America’s horses, finally ending the killing for good.
A recent report from a US NGO (Non Government Organisation) suggests that in a US state laboratory, cats are infected with the infectious disease toxoplasmosis for research purposes. For years they were given the meat of dogs and other cats.
In addition, laboratory mice have been injected with the tissue of sick cats.
Certain tests were quite bizarre and included feeding the cats the body parts of other animals – dogs and other cats – infected with toxoplasmosis, injecting mice with fluids harvested from dead animals, and so on. The body parts, those were for the food of the kittens, had been procured by the USDA at animal meat markets in China and Vietnam (!!!) according to the report.
Research on food safety
The shocking information on conditions at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, a US Department of Agriculture research center in the state of Maryland, has now been disclosed in a report by the White Coat Waste Project, which combats government-sponsored animal testing.
The report highlights the activities of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), specifically its research into toxoplasmosis, which has been going on since 1982 at the Animal Parasitic Disease Lab in Beltsville, Maryland.Toxoplasmosis is a parasite disease, believed to be affecting nearly half of humankind and many domestic animals.
It poses only health risks to those, whose immune system is weakened, and it usually evokes no noticeable symptoms.
The infected cats were then tested, parasitic eggs were harvested from their feces and the cats were killed two weeks later – as they had developed immunity.Although the animals were perfectly alright to adopt and the potential owners had not taken any health risks, thousands of healthy kittens were illegally euthanized.
Not all kittens become infected with the disease as a result. However, they are still killed instead of being rehomed. And so USDA has “disposed of” thousands of healthy kittens. “These healthy kittens –who briefly pass the parasite’s eggs and become immune within weeks– are then killed and incinerated by USDA because they are no longer useful,” the report states.
US Department of Agriculture
“A total of 2,988 cats have been used in these research efforts that began in 1982,”USDAadministrator Chavonda Jacobs-Young wrote in a response to an inquiry from Congress in May, according to the Washington Post.
The cats will then be euthanized and burned – as well as using them for tests in the first place- a practice that has often led to criticism in the past. “It is unnecessary and unjustifiable,” the watchdog stated. The scientific value of such tests has been very limited and even further diminished in the last two decades.
“Animal experiments conducted by the USDAare an example of ‘incredible’ hypocrisy, especially as the US Congress condemned cat and dog meat farms and markets. The congress has banned them in the US to put pressure on other countries that had such markets, “said Justin Goodman, vice president of the White Coat Waste project.
“The US government has been sending people and money over to these countries and subsidizing these horrible cat and dog meat farms and markets, that Congress is so disgusted with, and virtually everyone in America wants to see ended. So it’s incredibly ironic and hypocritical,” Goodman told RT. “And I think it is a testament to the incredible lack of accountability at the USDA. When on one hand you have the entire nation working to stop the practice that the USDA is helping to keep alive.
Truth is that virtually any experiment on animals in the United States is legal as long as the right paperwork is filled out.”
While the USDA admitted that a “total of 2,988 cats have been used in these research efforts,” the animal rights group believes the death toll for felines is actually considerably higher. Last year, it sued the USDA, accusing it of withholding information on the cat-horror Maryland laboratory.
Watchdog group White Coat Waste Projectwants the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), which runs the lab, to end the experiments and disclose all information about the harrowing tests.
My comment: Again someone was bribed from the pharmaceutical Mafia to conduct such experiments! And with the money of the US citizens! What was done there is against any normal ethics, absolutely unnecessary and disgusting.
Animal cruelty and corruption, nothing more.
I would give the people a lifelong professional ban.
It’s your last chance to show your support for New Zealand dolphins …
The smallest dolphins in the world are in big trouble – they need your help. We can save them if the New Zealand government bans certain fishing nets from the areas where the dolphins live. Our petition will close soon so please sign and share it if you haven’t already
When you go to our petition, you may notice something’s different – I’m very pleased *drum roll* to let you know that we have launched a new website. We hope we have made it much easier to find everything you ever wanted to know about whales, dolphins and porpoises and how your support is helping us keep them safe and free.
We’d love to know what you think of the new site. All comments – positive, negative or anywhere in-between – will be very gratefully received and will help us make your website the best experience that we can for you.
In Malta the bird catching is a popular sport. Unlike in most other fishing areas in the Mediterranean, however, the captured songbirds do not end up in the pan, but end up as pets in the living rooms of supposed “bird lovers”.
In Malta’s capital, Valletta, a large bird market takes place every Sunday, which is even mentioned in the guidebooks as a tourist attraction.
Bird trapping was permitted until Malta’s accession to the EU in 2004.
With Malta’s accession to the European Union in 2004, the end of legal songbird catching should be heralded. The accession treaty stipulated that first of all the annual fishing time would be shortened, and on 31.12.2008 bird catching was finally banned.
In fact, the bird catchers had to shut down their nets for a few years, until the fall of 2014.
Prime Minister Joseph Muscat decided to allow bird trapping between mid-October and the end of December. The Social Democrat, who came to power in 2013, had promised support to the hunting lobby during the election campaign.
In addition, the government gave in to the massive pressure of the birdcatcher lobby and again allowed the bird catch against EU law.
Since then thousands of finches may be caught legally for several weeks in late autumn! In 2015, for example, 12,000 linnets, 800 goldfinches, 4,500 greenfinches, 2,350 siskins, 500 hawfinches, 5,000 chaffinches and 2,350 female carps were released.
It is to be feared that far more animals will be caught and illegally sold on the black market.
But that’s not enough for the Maltese bird catchers. Many have gone underground and have specialized in new prey: that is mainly waders.
Catch net from the air
With gigantic catches of more than 5,000 square feet and electronic decoys, woodcocks, sandpipers, alpine, dwarf and Temminck sandpipers are now being caught in dozens of places on the island. Many animals end up as “living collectibles” in aviaries, others in the pan.
The Committee Against Bird Slaughteruses specialized teams against this new form of environmental crime to find traps and collect evidence for the police. Every year we are attacked by more than a dozen poachers.
Update.
Maltese birdcatchers involved: In a special operation this week, three committee teams have observed 9 active traps with huge nets from different observation points off the coast west of Mtahleb. The birdcatchers had equipped the illegal facilities with live decoys and electronic baits to catch protected liners.
The police contacted by us appeared with two patrols, which unfortunately had a hard time on the ground to convict the poachers. At the end of a police operation lasting several hours, the officers had arrested only three poachers, not all nets and decoys could be secured, several bird trappers escaped.
The committee against the bird murder published today a press release to the disappointing yield and a video (see above).
My comment:Malta is the last EU Member State to allow bird hunting in the spring. The European Court of Justice had condemned the country in 2009 for hunting prohibited under EU law. However, every year Malta receives an exemption allowing the shooting of 11,000 lovebirds and 5,000 quails within a two-week period.
Again and again, however, the permissible quotas of a maximum of four animals per hunter are exceeded and also protected bird species such as storks or sailor birds are killed.
Of course everything is caught and shot there, not just what the odds give. Malta is the most hunted region in the world.There are about 10,000 hunters and 6,000 trappers. Almost every adult man is a “hunter” licensed to kill birds. Many also keep hunting dogs. These are, when they are older and no longer agile enough, simply “disposed of”! Anyone wandering the island in the fall meets men with shouldered rifles at every turn or hears shots from close range.
Apparently, apart from the tourist season, the hunters have no other useful occupation than shooting birds like amok runners.
Why should the hunters of Malta be an exception and not behave like professional killers or psychopaths?
Selfridges has said it will ban the sale of exotic animal skins such as alligator, crocodile and python.
From February 2020, the luxury London department store will only sell leather from agricultural livestock.
The Humane Society International said the move was the “natural next step for a responsible retailer” and would save “countless” crocodiles and snakes.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) has urged rival stores, such as Harvey Nichols, to follow suit.
Yvonne Taylor, director of corporate projects at Peta, told BBC News: “Hats off to Selfridges – which had already banned fur, angora, and foie gras after persuasive talks with Peta – for now ending the sale of wild animals’ ‘exotic’ skins.”
The industry is not only “heartless”, but “extremely wasteful”, Peta claims, saying it can take the skins of four crocodiles to make a single bag.
The BBC understands that the ban will mainly affect sales of very high end, expensive accessories, particularly shoes and handbags.
The move follows an announcement from designer Victoria Beckham that she would stop using exotic skins in her designs from her autumn/winter 2019 collection onwards.
Beckham joins Vivienne Westwood, Diane von Furstenberg and Chanel in the ban – alongside high street brands such as Topshop, H&M and Adidas.
The company’s head of fashion, Bruno Pavlovksy, said it had become harder to source such skins ethically.
Meanwhile, British designer Stella McCartney’s “vegetarian brand” has never used leather, skin, fur or feathers.
The brand uses leather alternatives such as recycled polyester instead of Brazilian calf leather – which it claims has a high environmental impact.
Selfridges, which banned the sale of fur in 2005, said banning exotic skins was part of a “long-standing commitment to place ethics and sustainability at the heart of commercial decisions”.
Selfridges’ buying director Sebastian Manes said the brand was fixed on being at “the very forefront of future thinking retail”.
He added: “For us, that’s a future where luxury is defined by craftsmanship and material innovation.”
In 2015, the store removed single-use plastic water bottles from sale and made its signature yellow paper bags from recycled coffee cups.
Since the beginning of this year, all clothes bags have been made with used plastic bottles.
In the charity sector, the British Heart Foundation will not accept real fur or fur-trimmed items, or anything made from ivory.
Oxfam told the BBC it does not sell products made from crocodile or alligator skin, angora wool or fur.
It also checks legal regulations for items made of snakeskin, tortoiseshell and coral, and will only sell ivory if it can be proven that the product was made before 1947.
Peta’s Ms Tayor said conscientious and informed consumers “absolutely reject the exotic skins trade, which invariably torments and kills crocodiles, snakes, lizards, and other sentient, beautiful animals in appalling ways for fashion”.
She added: “Peta urges other department stores, like Harvey Nichols, and brands such as Louis Vuitton to follow Selfridges’ business-savvy example.”
A spokesperson for Harvey Nichols told the BBC: “Harvey Nichols requires any brand that uses fur or exotic skins to adhere to the Animal Sourcing Principles as set out by the Responsible Luxury Initiative (ReLi)”.
The ReLi claims to have set “high level principles” for the sourcing of leather, fur and exotic skins, but Peta maintains that there are “few laws” to protect reptiles from abuse.
According to Peta the illegal trade in exotic skins is “rampant” – with an estimated US $1bn worth of python skins imported into Europe illegally each year.
The group also claims that many of the millions of reptiles whose skins are exported from Southeast Asia each year belong to endangered species, whose numbers in the wild are “drastically dwindling”.
Department store John Lewis told the BBC that it does not sell any products with exotic animal skins.
Imagine the deafening sound of dozens of 90,000-pound “thumper” trucks shooting violent tremors through the ground.
Now, imagine them barreling over the dens of mother polar bears and straight through the birthing grounds of wild Porcupine caribou.
This will be the terrible fate of Alaska’s serene Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, one of the very last unspoiled wild places left on our planet, if we allow President Trump and Acting Interior Secretary David Bernhardt to throw open this sanctuary to oil and gas drilling.
NRDC is mounting a powerful counteroffensive using all of the tools at our disposal — and step one is raising a public outcry so loud that we can’t be ignored.
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is home to polar bears, caribou, wolves, and migratory birds from all 50 states, and vital to the culture and survival of the native Gwich’in people, who have depended on this land for thousands of years.
And with temperatures in the Arctic rising at twice the rate of the rest of the planet, the Refuge’s fragile habitat is ground zero for global warming.
But even with so much at stake,industry allies in Congress voted for the first time ever to open up the Arctic Refuge for oil and gas drilling — and the Trump administration is now fast-tracking plans to auction off the land to the highest bidder.
The Interior Department could slow or reconsider these plans, but Acting Administrator David Bernhardt — a former oil lobbyist — has made his priorities clear: Drive up profits for his fossil fuel allies, even if it means destroying the Arctic Refuge forever.
The Senate will soon vote on Bernhardt’s nomination to become the official Interior Secretary. And if confirmed — which is likely — his and President Trump’s attacks on wild places like the Arctic Refuge will continue unabated.
And if the Trump administration isn’t stopped, lease sales for drilling in the Refuge’s pristine coastal plain could begin this year, resulting in an industrial wasteland of rigs, roads, pipelines, and toxic waste pits.
Mark, this is the fight of our lifetimes — once the Arctic Refuge is handed over to Big Oil, there’s no turning back. With your support, we’re fighting on multiple fronts: Mobilizing massive public opposition, arming the national media with the facts, battling in Washington, and getting ready for court.
This land cannot defend itself. Mark, the reason the Arctic Refuge still exists as a protected wildlife sanctuary is because NRDC, our allies, and supporters like you have raised our voices together and fought for decades to keep it that way.
This is the closest Big Oil has ever gotten to invading the Arctic Refuge — and we need as many people as possible to stand strong and speak out in its defense.
The monkeys were used for experiments on the brain, for Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease. The video shows macaque monkeys in sterile cages, the irreverent handling of the staff with them and preparations for brain experiments.
The French organization “Animal Testing”took pictures with a hidden camera in the basement of a hospital in Paris. The suffering of the animals in animal experiments is immense.
The laboratories are massively scrapping and doing their utmost to ensure that the horror does not reach the public. Authentic images are extremely hard to come by and only possible through such undercover actions as shown here. Animal experiments are cruel and unnecessary!
The monkeys live for years in cages of about one cubic meter.
They only come out for the experiments
They do not see daylight
They are made artificially ill and live with implants in their skullcap. These pictures in the Video were filmed in the basement of a Paris hospital.
To develop Parkinson’s disease, monkeys are poisoned with the Nerve poisontMPTP.
Unable to feed themselves, they must be stuffed.
A researcher calls this “just about to die”.
They are kept in individual cages and poisoned.
A monkey is blind for unknown reasons.
He sits dejectedly in his cage, and is no longer used for research.
He spends his life in this cage without getting out.
The researcher believes that “this will end badly”
(Translation of the Video- dialogues between the laboratory technicians in the laboratory):
“The problem with the MPTP is that they can not eat anymore. Therefore, you are forced to cram them. If you look at them, they are about to die. They are completely stretched down.
-Yes! this one has big problems -Is that the one who sees nothing anymore? -Yes exactly! This morning an ophthalmologist came.. -To take care of his eyesight?
-Well, yes .. not to treat him, but to determine what he has. -But then he does not work anymore? -No no. -He does not do anything anymore? -Yes, I think that will end badly. -Yes? -Yes, that’s for sure!”
Some monkeys refuse to participate in the experiments. A researcher calls a monkey the last dirt
(laborant): “The females are really poison gnomes. These are already 11 years. And this is really the last thing. He could easily do the job (!!!) Only that he does not feel like it. It looks like he’s doing 4-5 tries, and the moment you say, “Let’s do it, you’re kidding us, we’ll stop,” and Hopp! He makes 3-4 attempts again, he stops again, starts again, stops again”…
Fixing chair
The monkeys get used to them by denying them water and food.
This is the phase of mental breakup of the animal.
This may take a week or more, until the monkey accepts to put its head out of the chair and be fixated on the neck.
(laborant): ” Here .. I had a lot of problems with him, he was very unruly. When you open that part of the chair, the animal voluntarily sticks its head out. The first time they do it, and then you close. They have then focussed the head outside, and are not free in their movement.
The first time they are so fooled, after a few weeks you can not do it anymore, because they know what happens to them. And it’s right when you break, it is just right to break the monkey!
Yet (a monkey) took a week to do that. He did not eat for a week.
( Laboratory assistant ): -Its hard! And there is only this possibility ? … -Yes! there are only these”!
This is how the daily life of monkeys in the Parisian laboratory is depicted. The monkeys suffer in this lab for an average of 10 years!
Trepanation
Trepanation or craniotomy is a surgical procedure in which a circular hole is drilled in the skull to approach the brain. At all the monkeys you will see, a trepanation has been made.
“At her, the implant was used shortly before the holidays.
This animal is still very young, so he just arrived. He has already been implanted.
There is also a little boy who has arrived recently.
This is one of mine, but unfortunately he has lost his impantation.
This one was on yesterday, so it is isolated.
Unfortunately, a craniotomy was performed on him, you can see that he has his fixation implant, it’s the one in front.”
Experiments on eyesight
A monkey is moored in a fixation chair: hands, feet and neck are fixed.
He has to respond to signals on a screen in a box, and receives water as a reward.
The researchers observe his behavior on a screen.
But on that day, the 11-year-old monkey refuses to submit to the experiment.
He closes his eyes, the researchers laugh.
They say a “war of nerves” with the animal is waiting for them.
(laughter in labor)
-Do you notice that the monkey mocks you? -Exactly! Because he does nothing? -He gets that on the screen. That makes 27 attempts in 2400..that makes 20 minutes..ah … sorry .. it’s 40 minutes So 27 attempts in 40 minutes, he should normally have done in 340 minutes ..300 / 400 attempts. And here you see that he just closes his eyes. He shows: “I’m annoying you”! -Yes! now he starts to move to his chair and .. -Yes! he gets nervous. That’s the phase of the confrontation. Nothing happens anymore. A nervous was. Exactly, it was a nerve, that’s it. And then you have an 11 years old monkey. In my opinion, you are not bringing anything new to an old monkey”!!
This Parisian institute still carries out its experiments.
Witness call – PLEASE SHARE! Students, researchers, zookeepers, veterinarians, laboratory workers: you are witness to abuse, suffering, or difficult experiments. Report to us!
My comment: the witness callthe organization “doctors against animal testing” is very innovative and an excellent idea. Hopefully, this idea will be followed by other organizations around the world.
We need civil courage. We all have to have that.
Especially in this area only courageous laboratory contributors can make this torture public when they report it. Do not hesitate, have courage, contact the organization, report about the crimes of the psychopats!!
US Department of Agriculture
Catch net from the air
“At her, the implant was used shortly before the holidays.
World Animals Voice 