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Regards Mark
Month: February 2022
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“All over the world, animals are abused in the animal feed industry
Here we see young calves in the dairy industry in America
Kidnapped by their mother immediately after calving
And were thrown into drinking a cheap substitute in the bitter cold of a blizzard.
Many of the calves do not survive the cold nights
And their death counts as rubble, like a damaged shoe thrown in the trash
And farmers receive compensation from agricultural insurance”
And I mean…Treating baby animals under the age of five weeks this way is a perversion.
To conceal the perversion of enslaving other animals, we must become accustomed to cruelty.
The system of the criminal meat industry takes care of that.
This system has corrupted human consciousness, we are used to cruelty.
This cruelty has become part of our everyday life and is perceived by us as a universal necessity
That is why such systems are kept alive
regards to all, Venus
Camels are forced to wrestle with each other until one falls over or shows fear
Every year around mid-January, the annual International Camel Wrestling Festival in western Turkey commences. The contest area fills with hundreds of camels covered in brightly colored decorations – as well as muzzles to keep them from biting and seriously wounding each other – who will tussle until humans declare one of them the victor.
But now, the “sport” is now coming under heat from Turkish animal lovers who want to protect camels from abuse and cruelty.
This year, handlers gathered 152 camels together for the tradition’s 40th event.
During the tournament, thousands of eager spectators surround the wrestling creatures, setting up barbecues and roaring as camels dominate one another.
Vendors even sell camel meat snacks and street food to viewers who munch on the cousins of the very animals they’re watching.
And meanwhile, camels wrestle until one or the other topples over, screams out, or retreats in fear.
Spectators claim that because the sport is billed as “wrestling” instead of fighting, it’s not harmful to the animals and is instead just an innocently fun pastime.
Turkish animal lovers are pushing back, calling the annual wrestling matches “shameful” and are pushing others to see the inhumanity.
These animals are exposed to unnatural conditions that cause them to feel confusion, stress, fear, and panic – which is how humans are able to force them to act in aggressive ways, just for our entertainment.
From the loud noises of spectators, to the training involved in convincing camels to wrestle each other, animals are still being used and exploited.
It’s time for us to stand with animal lovers in Turkey and elevate their voices. Demand protections for camels and an end to this exploitative contest forcing camels to wrestle each other!
Sign the petition to demand an end to these inhumane camel wrestling matches!
And I mean…In Spain, bullfighting has a long (and nowadays unacceptable) tradition. In many other countries, roosters are let loose on one another in an arena, to the amusement of the spectators.
The primitives are entertained by it, and make profit from it.
Camel wrestling was originally a competition between caravan owners.
Camel wrestling season is a highlight in Turkey today.
People climb to watch and see the camel fights during the festivals while vendors sell camel meat alongside the venues.
The animals fight in front of the spectators and suffer, are wounded or even kill each other.
During the fight, which lasts a few minutes, one camel must wrap its neck around the other camel’s neck or trip the loser and pin him to the ground.
The winner gets prize money and the loser gets butchered.
Although Turkey’s Animal Welfare Law bans animal fighting and a change in the law last summer introduced fines and jail terms, municipalities obtain “special permits” from district governor’s offices for such events under the guise of festivals.
And that’s what they call millennia-old culture!
My best regards to all, Venus
WAV Comment – Don’t mess with him ! – he has a gun and must wear combat trousers ! – therefore he is a ‘hunter man’.
Mississippi hunter Doug Borries has caught and killed an enormous 13.4 ft alligator weighing 905 pounds near a South Florida lake.
The reptile was suspected of eating livestock on private property in Okeechobee County, and was considered a threat. The owner of the property agreed to have it killed.
“I had no idea the magnitude of how big his body was until we pulled him completely out of the lake,” said Mr Borries.
“Size does matter,” he wrote on his company Facebook wall, Dynamic Outdoors TV, with images of him standing next to the enormous creature, sitting on its back and pulling open its jaws. “To me, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” he told WXXV News 25.
Mr Borries staked out the animal, estimated to be 80-years-old, before daylight, spotted it on an island in the lake and shot it.
The hunter has come under fire for killing the animal, instead of trapping it or sedating it and having it relocated to a wildlife sanctuary.
“I hope God forgives you for needlessly killing this creature,” wrote one person.
“Pretty hard to kill an 80 -year-old alligator wow be proud,” said another user.
“This is disgusting!!! Do you feel like a big man now you could have put your obvious large ego away and contacted any of the wonderful alligator reserves where this magnificent creature could have lived out its life. But no, the big man’s hunter had to kill an animal that was surviving and you just acted like an animal right back, instead of being a human and understanding nature,” said another.
“Shooting a huge barely moving animal with a high powered rifle and calling it hunting is an insult to real hunters,” commented another.
“What an incredibly cowardly thing to do. Did anyone not think of MOVING it, instead of murdering it?” wrote another.
Dynamic Outdoors defended its actions by explaining how dangerous gators this size can be. “Just like sharks, a small one can leave you with an injury that may be recoverable but an incredible large/oversized specimen can take [you] out,” it wrote on social media.
This gator was about a foot short of a state record, reported the Sun Herald. The longest gator captured in Florida was 14 feet, 3.5 inches and was caught in Lake Washington, Brevard County.
Mr Borries has said the gator will not go to waste – most of it will be used as meat and be eaten, although he will take a trophy for himself and is having a full, life-size mount made of the gator’s hide.
Regards Mark
On Thursday, the ARD magazine #PlusMinus (Germany’s first public national television channel) broadcast a program about blood collection from pregnant mares in Iceland.
Scenes of violence against them were unleashed in order to drain 5 liters of blood per “session”.
An outcry went through the social media landscape and many riders, who often celebrate their festivals with bratwurst, steak, schnitzel, etc., were also shocked!
➡ https://www.daserste.de/…/hormone-von-stuten-fuer…
As the ARD correctly reported, this torture has to do in particular with the production of cheap meat.
Thus, the pork consumers are also directly involved in this cruelty to animals and therefore partly to blame!
But why is this blood needed at all?
The hormone #PMSG (Pregnant Mare’s Serum Gonadotropin) – also called eCG (Equine Chorionic Gonadotropin) – is found in the blood of pregnant mares.
This is a stimulating sex hormone which, among other things, European piglet producers use to stimulate their sows to become pregnant at a controlled time.
In this way, a group can be influenced to ensure that many sows are ready to conceive at the same time and therefore give birth at relatively the same time.
In intensive livestock farming, this is of course more lucrative in terms of the workflow!
A synthetic alternative would be e.g. Peforelin, which, however, does not lead to superovulation, i.e. the increased number of piglets as a side effect of PMSG, as well as a shortening of puberty, which contributes to earlier willingness to conceive and thus to higher profits.
The use of PMSG or eCG as a drug is approved in Germany for therapeutic and animal breeding purposes (!!!)
Politicians must act here and ban the use immediately and without a transitional period!
According to the Federal Veterinary Association, 10-15% of sows in Germany are currently treated with hormones.
But back to #Iceland:
The abuse of the calm Icelandic horses caused particular outrage.
Particularly frightening: In Iceland, the blood buyer Isteka announced an increase in the delivery volume from 170 t to 600 t last year (as of December 2021).
Blood collection in South America has been known to everyone for years, it is not welcomed, but tolerated.
Even outraged riders are not dissuaded from consuming pork.
Now this perfidious form of hormone production has also been documented in Iceland.
And of course there is no obligation to declare on the packaging about the use of this preparation in Germany anyway…
After the “Island research” the German Animal Welfare Association points out that there is also a horse blood farm in Germany. At the Meura Stud in Thuringia, the hormone PMSG is obtained from the blood of pregnant mares for the pharmaceutical industry.
And I mean…Animal Welfare’s videos clearly show the frightened animals being propelled forward through metal passages with bludgeons to the head, until they end up in a tethered position where their blood is drained.
On the so-called blood farms, which are mainly found in South America but even in Europe, hundreds of mares are crammed together
These are artificially inseminated in order to take up to 10 liters of blood once or twice a week for the first 11 weeks of pregnancy!
This insane amount, which corresponds to about a quarter of a horse’s total blood volume, is withdrawn from the horse with huge cannulas within a few minutes.
About 30 percent of mares die from this process alone.
If the foal has not yet died from the extreme nutrient deprivation after the end of the 11 weeks, the workers on the blood farms abort it by hand.
The horse’s uterus is slit open with a knife without being anaesthetized, which often means not “only” the foal, but also the foal his mother also finds an agonizing death. The mare will be killed anyway as soon as she can no longer be inseminated quickly. There is no veterinary care.
The mare will be killed anyway as soon as she can no longer be inseminated quickly.
100 grams of the hormone bring in about $900,000.
It therefore makes sense for the authorities and traders to keep the brutal animal abuse used to obtain the hormone under lock and key.
And now in our own country!
According to the Animal Welfare Foundation’s “Island research”, the German Animal Welfare Association points out that there is also a horse blood farm in Germany.
At the Meura Stud in Thuringia, the hormone PMSG has apparently been illegally extracted from the blood of pregnant mares for the pharmaceutical industry for over 30 years.
The taking of blood, which is to be regarded as an animal experiment requiring approval, has been illegal for years – this has now been proven by the German Animal Welfare Association.
The valid German guidelines for the protection of horses state unequivocally that no blood may be drawn from a mare that is in foal.
When asked, the owner of the Meura stud farm, Anke Sendig, openly admitted that she did not have any approval for taking blood, because “it is not necessary because it is a manufacturing process that is not subject to any approval requirements,” says Sendig.
Incidentally, the responsible veterinary office also confirmed this outrageously: “The legislator did not provide for this. Accordingly, it is neither necessary nor possible to grant a permit.”
But that violates the law when a county veterinary office unilaterally says it’s legal to rape horses and severely abuse pregnant mares.
Germany’s farm lobby has its own laws, some of which are self-written and controlled by farm dealers.
So the blood dealers of Meuka can breathe easy. They have little to fear because apparently in prosecuting crimes they dictate the state the law.
My best regards to all, Venus
Frogs regrow amputated legs in breakthrough experiment (msn.com)
Scientists have regrown frogs’ amputated legs after giving them a “cocktail” of drugs encased in a silicon stump.
African clawed frogs (Xenopus laevis) are like humans in that they can’t naturally regrow lost limbs. In the new study, researchers successfully coaxed the frogs to grow replacement limbs in 18 months following a treatment that lasted just 24 hours. While there’s a massive difference between frogs and humans, the finding raises the possibility that in the future, humans could also regrow limbs.
“It’s exciting to see that the drugs we selected were helping to create an almost complete limb,” first author Nirosha Murugan, a research affiliate at Tufts University in Massachusetts, said in a statement. “The fact that it required only a brief exposure to the drugs to set in motion a months-long regeneration process suggests that frogs and perhaps other animals may have dormant regenerative
Animals have natural abilities to regenerate themselves. For example, human bodies close open wounds and can even use stem cells to regrow parts of the liver. Some animals, such as salamanders, can regrow whole limbs and other missing parts. The mechanisms behind limb regeneration are not fully understood, but neither humans nor adult frogs are capable of regrowing legs and arms, perhaps because those limbs are so complex.
Both humans and frogs cover an open amputation wound in scar tissue to stop further blood loss and infection. Humans have developed prosthetic replacement limbs but scientists have been unable to recover or reverse the loss of a major limb like an arm or leg.
The latest research used multiple drugs to regenerate lost limb tissue. The team surgically amputated frogs’ legs and then applied a silicone cap they called a “BioDome” to each frog’s wound. The cap released a cocktail of five drugs, including growth hormones, that perfomed different roles, such as encouraging nerves and muscles to grow. One of the drugs also prevented the frogs’ bodies from producing collagen, which normally causes wounds to scar over.
“Using the BioDome cap in the first 24 hours helps mimic an amniotic-like environment, which, along with the right drugs, allows the rebuilding process to proceed without the interference of scar tissue,” co-author David Kaplan, a professor of engineering at Tufts University, said in the statement.
Embryos and fetuses develop in an amniotic sac during pregnancy. The team was able to trigger some of the same molecular pathways in the frogs that are used when an embryo is growing and taking shape.
The new legs looked similar to normal legs with similar bone structure, except for the toes, which lacked underlying bones. The frogs were able to use their new leg to swim like a regular leg.
The findings were published Jan. 26 in the journal Science Advances.
Originally published on Live Science.
Regards Mark
Oil tanker capable of carrying 2 million barrels explodes off coast of Nigeria (msn.com)
An oil production ship capable of carrying up to 2 million barrels of oil has exploded off the coast of Nigeria.
According to local reports, the Trinity Spirit exploded on Thursday morning at the Ukpokiti oil field off Nigeria’s coast near the Escravos terminal close to the River Niger delta.
Dramatic video shows the ship on fire with thick black smoke rising into the sky as it appears to be sinking.
The vessel is an FPSO, a floating production storage and offloading unit, which is reportedly owned by Shebah Exploration & Production Company Ltd (SEPCOL).
These types of ships are used by the offshore oil and gas industry for the production and processing and storage of oil and serve a similar function to larger oil rigs.
The ship had ten crew members on board, chief executive Ikemefuna Okafor said on Thursday, according to Reuters.
It is not believed the crew members have yet been accounted for.
Mr Okafor said investigations were underway to establish the cause of the explosion while attempts to contain the situation were being made with help from local communities and Chevron, which has a facility nearby.
“At this time there are no reported fatalities, but we can confirm that there were ten crew men on board the vessel prior to the incident and we are prioritising investigations with respect to their safety and security,” he said.
While it is not yet clear how much oil will be spilled by the Trinity Spirit, commentators have warned Nigeria could be facing its second environmental disaster in three months, after a huge oil spill from a disused, capped well head released 20,000 barrels of oil a day for a month into the waterways of Nembe, in Nigeria’s Bayelsa state.
The impact of that spill was described as being “like Hiroshima”, by the Nigerian government, with the leaking oil causing the death of marine life and damage to mangroves and waterways.
Regards Mark
From ‘The Guardian’ – London.
An animal rights activist was in court on criminal charges. Why was the case suddenly dismissed?
Matt Johnson conducted an undercover exposé of cruel practices used to mass exterminate pigs at Iowa Select Farms facilities
When animal rights activist Matt Johnson last made national news, he was in disguise. He appeared on Fox Business in December 2020, sporting a buzz cut and button-down (much different from his usual casual attire) and posed as the CEO of Smithfield Foods. The pork giant he claimed to be representing had factory farms that were “petri dishes for new diseases”, he told the news anchor. After the segment went viral online, Fox realized their mistake: “It appears we have been punked,” host Maria Bartiromo announced, apologizing to Smithfield, which called the interview “a complete hoax”.
Johnson’s antics, and his seeming lack of fear of the consequences, have made him a formidable opponent of the meat industry. But while the Fox incident offered a moment of levity, today, Johnson makes the news for something far more serious. He has just been let off for criminal charges that could have sent him to prison for up to eight years. After conducting an undercover exposé of conditions at the pork company Iowa Select Farms in May 2020, his actions put him on the line for burglary and planting recording devices. Another charge, for trespassing at a food operation (an offense created by an Iowa ag-gag law), was added in 2021.
While these specific charges against Johnson can’t be brought again, they may not be his last. His work as an organizer with the animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) involves high-profile, high-risk actions like secretly recording factory farms and rescuing animals. Since farm animals are legally property and have no rights and almost no protection from suffering, removing them is usually treated as burglary, no different from stealing jewellery or someone’s wallet. In the last decade, many state “ag-gag” laws have sought to further criminalize such activism.The conditions that brought Johnson, an Iowa native now based in California, to Iowa Select Farms facilities were particularly cruel, according to DxE – and the outrage that followed his exposé suggests the public were similarly alarmed. As Covid was tearing through US slaughterhouses, Johnson had been tipped off by an Iowa Select truck driver about conditions at the company’s facilities.
Across the meat industry, workers were falling ill, meatpacking capacity was significantly reduced, and farms were overloaded with animals and looking for ways to dispose of them. Johnson was made aware of a practice called “ventilation shutdown”, being used by Iowa Select to mass exterminate pigs: the animals were packed into sealed barns and essentially cooked to death by heaters and steam generators.
Continued on next page
Greenpeace.at: The last elephants in Indonesia are threatened with extinction! There are very few Sumatran elephants left in the wild.
Their rainforests are being brutally cleared for palm oil plantations.
But we can help you now!
The EU Commission has presented a law that would ban the trade in goods from rainforest destruction in Europe.
Among them is palm oil, which deprives the Sumatran elephants of their homes.
We must now ensure that the law is as strong as possible and accepted by the EU member states!
Sumatran elephants are the largest inhabitants of Sumatra and are among the smallest elephant species – they are very special. The social animals form protective groups in which they roam the low hills of the Indonesian island. It has been like this for many thousands of years; the peaceful pachyderms do not disturb anyone.
The home of the elephants destroyed
But the Sumatran elephants are being pushed out of their only homeland. Because larger and larger parts of the rainforest are being destroyed for monotonous palm oil monocultures.
Not even protected areas are spared, as a Greenpeace report showed! Where once there was living forest, there are now only plantations for palm oil and paper for miles.
Corporations have broken promises
Corporations like Nestlé, Mondelēz and Unilever have repeatedly promised an end to the destruction of forests for their products.
They claimed to stop using palm oil from rainforest destruction by 2020. But hardly anything has happened.
The Sumatran elephants are now on the brink of extinction. There are very few left in the wild.
But we can help the elephants!
If the corporations don’t act, laws are needed. And an important law is now within reach: A law that could ban the trade in goods from rainforest destruction on the EU market!
This is our chance to protect the habitat of the Sumatran elephants! However, we must now ensure that the law becomes as strong as possible and accepted by EU member states.
Please sign the petition for a strong law banning the trade in goods from rainforest destruction in Europe!
https://wald.greenpeace.at/sumatra-elefanten/
And I mean…The Sumatra Elephant has little time.
According to environmentalists, it could be extinct within three decades if the rapid deforestation in its habitat is not stopped immediately.
It belongs to the growing list of Indonesian species threatened with extinction – such as Sumatran orangutan, Javan and Sumatran rhino and Sumatran tiger.
The Indonesian government urgently needs to design a protection strategy, with new protection regions and corridors between isolated areas.
The Sumatran elephant is legally protected in Indonesia. But 85 percent of the areas in which it still occurs are outside the protection zones, so protection only applies on paper.
The population has declined by 80 percent in 75 years due to poaching, pollution and habitat destruction.
The Sumatran elephant is a subspecies of the Asian elephant, the largest land mammal in Asia. It is the lightest colored variant. Female elephants and their offspring form close-knit family groups of up to ten animals and a matriarch at the head.
If we don’t act now, in 100 years the earth’s lungs will be dead, animals will be extinct and humans will be in grave danger.
We all bear the responsibility that this terrible end does not come
My best regards to all, Venus
Pictured: a pigeon pirate spotted on January 8 along Broome and Norfolk streets in the Lower East Side, captured in a photo posted to Instagram by food blogger Mike Chau
The pigeon poachers, one pictured with a net full of pigeons above, are known to sell the birds to hunting and gun clubs for live shoots
Pigeon pirates are spotted illegally catching birds on the streets of Manhattan to sell to gun clubs to be SHOT for sport, animal rights activists claim
- Pigeon pirates are illegally catching the birds on the streets of Manhattan to sell them out of state gun clubs to be killed for sport, animal rights activists claim
- On January 16, Susan Tang and her husband, Nicholas, witnessed two men in a van bearing New York plates as they captured about 50 pigeons in Hell’s Kitchen
- ‘It was deeply disturbing. I’m a born and raised New Yorker. I love everything about this city. The pigeons are as NYC as you can possibly get’ Tang said
- Another pigeon pirate spotted with a net full of pigeons on January 8 along Broome and Norfolk streets in the Lower East Side
- Punishment for the crime was not streamlined in NYC until 2019, when a new bill made it a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail and a $1000 fine
- A permit is required in order to trap pigeons citywide
Pigeon pirates are illegally catching the birds on the streets of Manhattan to sell them out of state gun clubs to be killed for sport, animal rights activists claim after two incidents were reported this month.
On the morning of January 16, Hell’s Kitchen residents Susan Tang and her husband, Nicholas, witnessed two men in a Dodge Caravan bearing New York plates as they tossed seeds along 10th Avenue between 58th and 59th streets, according to the New York Post.
The poachers ended up capturing about 50 pigeons with nets before throwing them into the van and fleeing the scene.
‘We followed the van as much as we could to try to focus on the license plate, which was obscured by a plastic cover of some sort,’ Susan Tang told the Post.
‘The driver was aware he was being followed and was blowing red lights and almost struck a group of pedestrians.’
While it has been illegal to capture and sell pigeons for years in New York City, punishment for the crime was not streamlined until 2019, when a new bill made it a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail and a $1000 fine.
A permit is required in order to trap pigeons citywide.
The couple, who took a photo of the van prior to losing sight of it, filed a complaint with both 311 and the state Department of Environmental Conservation, as well as notified the NYPD.
‘It was over and done with from start to finish in 20 seconds,’ Tang recalled.
‘It was deeply disturbing. I’m a born and raised New Yorker. I love everything about this city. The pigeons are as New York City as you can possibly get.’
According to Tang, investigators with the Department of Environmental Conservation already ‘know the suspect’s name and address and located the van complete with tons of feathers and pigeon poop inside.’
‘I have told him that my husband and I will testify if the case progresses,’ she added.
Elsewhere in the city, another pigeon pirate was spotted on January 8 along Broome and Norfolk streets in the Lower East Side, and was captured in a photo posted to Instagram by food blogger Mike Chau.
‘New York or Nowhere (yes that’s a whole flock of pigeons caught in a net being stuffed into the trunk of a car),’ Chau captioned the post.
As in the Hell’s Kitchen incident, the avian poacher made off with the birds without issue.
The incidents are currently ‘under investigation by the Animal Cruelty Investigation Squad,’ according to an NYPD spokesman.
Authorities believe they are a part of a group known for selling pigeons to various hunting and gun clubs for live shoots in Pennsylvania.
‘These helpless pigeons are sitting ducks. They are New Yorkers like you and I,’ said animal advocate John DiLeonardo.
The issue of pigeon pirates is hardly a new one in the Big Apple.
In 2008, animal rights activists accused a Brooklyn man of selling pigeons he caught for $5 to $10 to shooting contests out of state.
In 2015, roughly 300 pigeons were netted and captured from Washington Square Park, which were similarly sold to Pennsylvania live shoots.
Regards Mark
World Animals Voice 