“Verily man is king of all animals because his cruelty is superior to theirs”.
‘Leonardo da Vinci’
regards, Venus
Day: June 24, 2021
Hundreds of songbirds confiscated: Italian hunters need live decoys to hunt songbirds.
Because of the lawsuits brought by the committee against the bird murder and its partner LAC, the catching of birds has finally been banned since 2014, the hunters have to fall back on bred birds.
But there are doubts about aviculture in Italy.
As part of Operation “Lord of the Rings”, the Carabinieri have started to control the alleged breeding facilities.
It is now clear: something is wrong with many breeders.
They either do not have the facilities to successfully breed birds at all or they have far more young birds on offer than the existing adult birds can breed at all.
They simply rob the chicks from their nests in the wild or catch them illegally with nets.
They then come on the market with forged or manipulated cultivars.
In the last few months alone, there have been a dozen large police checks throughout Italy, during which hundreds of song- thrushes and blackbirds were seized, as well as protected species.
Committee members were there in May and June as experts and appraisers and helped to identify the birds illegally stolen from the wild.
The confiscated thrushes are now being prepared for their release in reception centers.
https://www.facebook.com/Komitee.CABS/
And I mean…An entire branch of industry has grown around bird hunting in Italy.
Hunting outfitters, off-road vehicle manufacturers and restaurants benefit from the hunting bacillus.
The state collects more than 700 million euros annually in the form of fees for hunting and gun licenses, catch and shooting permits and taxes on weapons, ammunition, vehicles and hunting equipment.
In 1993 a new national hunting law was passed in Rome, which largely forbids catching birds and placed almost all songbirds under nature protection.
Even so, almost 30 years later, the authorities are very reluctant to get the poaching under control. And the still legal form of hunting is an affront to nature and animal protection.
But there is reason to be hopeful.
In the big cities of Italy in particular, hardly anyone wants to endorse hunting anymore, and the hunters have great problems with their offspring.
The environmental and animal protection movement has produced numerous, very motivated associations that successfully promote broad animal protection and environmental awareness in Italy.
And the authorities are cracking down on poachers and bird trappers – as the committee reported to us in this case.
It’s a long process that comes with a lot of small successes.
In 10 years if there are really high penalties we will see a decrease in poaching
My best regards to all, Venus
From ‘Respect for Animals’ – Nottingham, England.
Canada Goose goes fur-free
Respect for Animals is delighted at the news that the retail giant Canada Goose is to end the use of real fur in all its products. The company has been notorious for using coyote fur trims on its parka coats, taken from animals caught in cruel leghold traps in North America, methods banned in the UK and the European Union. The decision to bring this to an end is a major blow to the cruel and unnecessary fur industry.
In a statement, Canada Goose said:
“Today, Canada Goose announced that it will end the use of all fur in its products… Through a phased approach, Canada Goose will end the purchase of fur by the end of 2021 and cease manufacturing with fur no later than the end of 2022.”
Respect for Animals welcomes this historic move and encourages all remaining retailers to listen to consumers and adopt fur-free policies as a matter of urgency.
Thank you to all those activists who have devoted time, effort and money over the years trying to convince Canada Goose to ditch the cruelty of real fur.
The future of fashion is fur-free!
The anti-fur movement is celebrating the news that the retail giant Canada Goose is to end its use of real fur in all its products. The company has been notorious for using coyote fur trims on its parka coats, taken from animals caught in cruel leghold traps in North America, methods banned in the UK and the European Union. The decision to bring this to an end is a major blow to the cruel and unnecessary fur industry.
In a statement, Canada Goose said:
“Today, Canada Goose announced that it will end the use of all fur in its products. This announcement is driven by its focus on its purpose-based platform, HUMANATURE, relentless innovation, and expanding lifestyle relevance. Through a phased approach, Canada Goose will end the purchase of fur by the end of 2021 and cease manufacturing with fur no later than the end of 2022.”
The move by Canada Goose is a further devastating blow to the fur trade’s baseless attempts to present itself as ‘sustainable’ through debunked schemes such as FurMark.
According to CNN:
“Thursday’s announcement is part of Canada Goose’s mission to become more sustainable. Earlier this year, it released it’s “most sustainable parka to date” that uses 30% less carbon and requires 65% less water during production compared to its current parka. The Toronto-based company said it’s committed to achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2025.”
Respect for Animals welcomes this historic move and encourages all remaining fur-selling retailers to listen to consumers and adopt fur-free policies as a matter of urgency.
Thank you to all those activists who have devoted time, effort and money over the years trying to convince Canada Goose to ditch the cruelty of real fur.
The future of fashion is fur-free!
For the animals,
The Respect for Animals team.
Fighting the international fur trade.
Respect for Animals | Campaign against animal fur – Fur for Animals
Regards Mark
Federal “Ag Gag” Bill Could Punish Negligent Farmers After Amendments at Committee
June 22, 2021
A legislative committee studying the proposed federal agricultural gag, or “ag gag”, law has amended the bill in response to concerns raised by Animal Justice and other animal protection groups, legal scholars, and even the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (“CFIA”).
Bill C-205 was introduced by Conservative MP John Barlow, and was originally designed to target animal advocates and concerned citizens. The Bill threatened these individuals with huge fines and even jail time for going onto a farm without permission.
Bill proponents said this was necessary to protect biosecurity on farms and prevent disease outbreaks, because people on farms without permission could introduce pathogens that harm animals. Yet the Bill would have exempted farm owners and operators—even though disease outbreaks caused by the actions of farm owners and operators are numerous, well-documented, and have had devastating consequences for animals and public health.
A new Animal Justice report, based on data from CFIA investigations, shows that disease outbreaks are regularly linked to standard farming practices and poor adherence to biosecurity protocols by farm owners and operators. Many of the outbreaks investigated by the CFIA were traced back to troubling practices like sharing needles and equipment, feeding animal parts back to animals, failure to properly disinfect trailers, and the exposure of farmed animals to virus-carrying wild animals.
Meanwhile, there has never been a single documented case of an animal advocate causing or contributing to a disease outbreak in Canada. And of course, entering farms without permission is already illegal.
Many Members of Parliament on the House of Commons Agriculture Committee clearly paid heed to the evidence about the disease risks regularly caused by farmers (despite not hearing oral testimony from Animal Justice or any other animal protection groups). At a meeting on June 17, 2021, the Committee amended the Bill so that it applies to farm owners and operators, and not just animal advocates.
If the Bill passes, farm owners and operators could be held accountable for breaching biosecurity protocols and exposing animals to pathogens that could reasonably harm them.
Research has shown that adherence by farmers to biosecurity protocols is notoriously poor in Canada and around the world, so this amendment is an important step toward protecting the health of animals on farms.
However, more needs to be done. Canada doesn’t comprehensively regulate biosecurity on farms. The CFIA publishes voluntary biosecurity guidelines, developed in cooperation with the farm industry and government. But following these guidelines is not a legal requirement for farmers. Instead, there should be clear rules that farmers must follow to prevent disease, and greater accountability for farmers that break the rules and cause devastating consequences for animals and the health of Canadians.
Now that the Committee has completed its study of Bill C-205, the Bill will return to the House of Commons for a third reading vote, which is unlikely to occur until much later this year because Parliament is about to break for the summer. If the Bill passes a third reading vote, it will then go on to be considered by the Senate.
Regards Mark
Stacey says:
Animal farmers are inherently negligent, subjecting all animals to control and violent death.
Thanks Stacey
Click on the link to see all the photos.
Dr. Charu Chandrasekera – Unbound Project
“IT IS GOING TO HAPPEN IN MY LIFETIME, AND IT’S A WIN-WIN SITUATION FOR EVERYONE INVOLVED.”
On a warm October day in Halifax, Dr. Charu Chandrasekera is attending the inaugural Canadian Animal Law Conference, to speak on a panel entitled, ‘Ending Animal Experimentation: New Advances.’ That same weekend, coincidentally, the Canadian Cancer Society’s CIBC Run For The Cure is also taking place, to raise funds for breast cancer research. As Dr. Chandrasekera and I sit in a coffee shop to discuss her work, participants jog by and she quips: “I wish I could tell them they are not running for a cure. They are running from a cure.”
And so began a conversation both enlightening and enraging, detailing Dr. Chandrasekera’s journey as a biomedical scientist growing increasingly disenchanted by the system within which she works, specifically due to the use of animal models in research.
Though her story lands her today as the Executive Director of the Canadian Centre for Alternatives to Animal Methods at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada, it surprisingly didn’t start with concern for animals.
“The journey didn’t start with anything to do with animals,” she says, “it was me trying to be a scientist.” In her postdoctoral training following her PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology, Dr. Chandrasekera says she actually specifically worked in animal research labs, “because it was ingrained in you that animal research is absolutely essential; and I believed it, I trusted it.”
Heart failure was her area of research, mice and rats her test subjects. “Some of the labs I worked in also had rabbit models, and I saw people working dog models of heart failure as well,” she says. Soon into the work, however, Dr. Chandrasekera says, “it became very obvious that the work I was doing was not translatable [to humans] the way I thought it was.” And though she would continue this work for a few years, she would also continue to question the purpose and effectiveness of testing on animals. “In the field that I was involved in, nothing was really reproducible; there were so many discrepancies and contradictions even among the top-notch researchers in that field.”
Today, she notes, drugs tested to be safe and/or effective in animal models have a 95 percent failure rate in human trials. Yes, read that over again.
During this period, says Dr. Chandrasekera, “while I was going through this whole experience in these animal research labs where scientifically they weren’t working, I was also going through a personal, moral journey at home.” Becoming visibly choked up, Dr. Chandrasekera speaks of her dear cat Mowgli, a grey tabby with green eyes.
“She [Mowgli] taught me all about animal sentience for the first time in my life, about who animals really are. That they are just like us, they feel pain, they feel joy, they are mischievous, they get mad, they like to enjoy, and they are conscious.”
There was a certain innocence and purity in Mowgli’s eyes, she says, that captivated her heart. “And soon enough, there were times when I would go into the lab and I would see the exact same innocence and purity in the eyes of a mouse. And to me, there was no difference between Mowgli and the mouse I was giving heart disease to.” Combined with the scientific failures of animal research, she says, “it was no longer justifiable.”
It was around this time Dr. Chandrasekera also adds, that she viewed the documentary Food, Inc., and immediately went vegan.
But it was in 2011 that Dr. Chandrasekera says she reached a point she describes as life-altering when her father had a heart attack and required bypass surgery. After staying at his bedside for weeks, she returned to the lab where they were working on heart failure research, specifically regarding certain receptors, if activated properly during a heart attack could be protective of the heart. “We had a number of different animal models of this,” she says, “and when I came back to the lab I talked to my professor I was working for, and I said ‘Do you think these receptors were activated in my dad during his heart attack?’ and he said –I’ll never forget this– ‘How the hell would I know? We’ve never looked at this in the human heart.’”
It was at that moment, she says, “everything within me sort of froze, and I thought, ‘What am I doing this for?’”
By 2012, Dr. Chandrasekera left traditional academia. She joined the American non-profit, The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, which promotes plant-based eating, as well as preventive medicine and alternatives to animal research. “It was during this period that I was exposed to this whole other world. I got to interact with big players across the globe, people who were legitimate scientists, who were regulators, who were pharma industry, who were investing and actively promoting alternatives to animal testing.” She calls it an awakening, an awakening within her, as well as within the scientific community.
“There was a huge global shift. Countries like the Netherlands just came up and said, ‘We’re going to end all animal testing for chemical safety by 2025’; all these things were happening,” she says.
“From Brazil to East Asia, there are many countries that have dedicated federally funded research to shift away from animal testing.”
Whenever she would attend international meetings however, “people always asked, ‘How come there is no centre for alternatives in Canada?’” That’s when Dr. Chandrasekera knew what she needed to do next.
So in 2016, Dr. Chandrasekera approached the Vice President of Research and Innovation at the University of Windsor with a proposal, and said “How would you like to have a centre like that here?” He was fully on board, she says, as was the new Dean of Science, and in less than a year the Canadian Centre for Alternatives to Animal Methods was established. With the help of a “transformative gift from the Eric S. Margolis Family Foundation,” she says, the centre now works in three main areas: biomedical research, regulatory testing, and developing courses and degrees focused on “training the next generation to think outside the cage.”
Dr. Chandrasekera says she can now foresee a future without animal testing.
“It is going to happen in my lifetime, and it’s a win-win situation for everyone involved.”
As another Run For the Cure participant saunters by the coffee shop window, Dr. Chandrasekera concludes: “This is about animals and this is about people like my dad. Alternatives to animal testing are where the world is headed, whether the scientific community likes it or not.”
Photos of Dr. Charu Chandrasekera by Frank Michael Photography. All other photos by Jo-Anne McArthur. Interview and story by Jessica Scott-Reid.
Jessica Scott-Reid is a Canadian journalist and animal advocate. Her work appears regularly in the Globe and Mail, New York Daily News, Toronto Star, Maclean’s Magazine and others.
Regards Mark
Sustain Blog says:
Thank you for the post on animal testing.
No problem – thanks for your comment.
World Animals Voice 