In parts of the USA, there is a fascinating natural spectacle in extremely cold winters: alligators freeze in the swamps and ponds. What initially looks hostile to life turns out to be a clever survival strategy
The wintertime sometimes brings with it rare weather phenomena and natural spectacles.
In parts of the USA, the icy winters in recent years have regularly resulted in very special images: the sharp-toothed mouths of alligators protrude from the frozen surface of the water and offer a bizarre sight.
Brazos Bend State Park, Texas, Amerika – Oktober 2016
In 2018 and 2019, for example, the alligators froze in the swamps of the Shallotte River Swamp Park in North Carolina.
This winter, American media reported frozen alligators in lakes in Oklahoma. Mississippi alligatorsinstinctively sense when a body of water freezes over.
The animals seem lifeless in the ice. The bodies can be seen outlined under the icy surface of the water, only the snouts sticking out of the ice. What at first looks like an involuntary shock freeze, on closer inspection, is a clever survival trick.
The reptiles are neither accidentally frozen nor are they dead. Instead, the Mississippi alligators, which live in the southeastern United States, are deliberately frozen in order to be able to survive extreme cold spells.
alligator mississippiensis
Alligatormississippiensisinstinctively knows when its native water is freezing over.
However, since frozen water is an absolute death trap for him, the alligator enters the water at the right moment and sticks its nose out before freezing – so that it can continue to breathe despite the ice cover.
Then the animal falls into a state that is biologically known as “dormancy” and is similar to hibernation in warm-blooded animals. The metabolism is shut down, body functions are reduced to a minimum, and energy is saved.
alligator mississippiensis
In this position, the Mississippi alligatorsare able to survive for up to two or even three months in spite of the extreme cold. They just wait for the temperature to rise again and the ice to melt. Then the reptiles adjust their body temperature and wake up from the rigor.
The animals spend milder winters comfortably buried in the bank mud or in deeper layers of water.
We just released a new investigation into Harris Beef, the slaughterhouse used by Harris Ranch, which is the largest cow feedlot on the West Coast. Harris claims their slaughter facilities were designed to be humane with curving chutes so the cows can’t see the danger ahead. But DxE’s hidden camera footage is showing the world the truth: terrified cows trying to escape from the slaughter line before they are systematically killed and butchered.
And the cruelty is growing. The Harris slaughterhouse is currently constructing several new buildings to expand its operations and increase its death toll. This is why we need a moratorium on factory farms and slaughterhouses right away.
DxE launched the No More Factory Farms campaign to combat the expansion of animal agriculture in California. We’re exposing the biggest animal abusers, mobilizing people throughout the state to take bold action, and creating the momentum for a moratorium that prohibits the construction or expansion of factory farms and slaughterhouses – first in California and then beyond.
DxE is funded entirely by people like you. And for the next 48 hours, all new $20+ monthly donors will receive a No More Factory Farms shirt as a thank you gift. Show your support for this campaign by becoming a monthly donor today.
Dolphin Project can confirm that on March 1, Taiji’s dolphin drive hunts ended for the 2020/21 season. During the entire six-month long hunting season, our collaboration with Life Investigation Agency (LIA), headed up by campaign director Ren Yabuki, ensured that an all-Japanese team was on the ground each day to document the drives and other events that took place. Never before has an all-Japanese team of dedicated activists taken up residence in Taiji, solely to document from a Japanese perspective, the suffering of dolphins that takes place annually at the Cove. As such, our educational outreach throughout Japan has never been greater.
This season, there were a total of 46 red coves (where dolphins were either slaughtered or taken captive) and 135 blue coves (where no dolphins were slaughtered or taken captive) involving six species of dolphins. We estimate 547 dolphins were slaughtered, while 140 were taken captive. Many more may have died as a result of the drives themselves, their numbers never recorded.
Dolphins, including the very young and the very old, were routinely subjected to harassment, suffering and abuse, slaughtered for their meat or taken captive to be exploited in marine parks and aquariums. Entire pods of dolphins were decimated. Several incidental deaths also took place, but thanks to the tireless documentation of the team, we were able to record the hunters’ shameless actions.
Over and over, once driven into the Cove, the team documented the prolonged suffering of dolphins. Even before the mammals are netted into the shallow water, the drives themselves often leave the pod exhausted, with visible injuries. Dolphin trainers work closely alongside dolphin hunters, choosing which mammals will be selected for “life” in captivity, and which will be slaughtered. Marine parks and aquariums often use the terms “conservation” and “education” when describing their captive dolphin displays. The reality however, lies in the bloody waters of this tiny Japanese town: demand for captive entertainment is what fuels Taiji’s drive hunts. Captive dolphin displays, including swim-with-dolphins programs aren’t educational, nor are they entertaining. They are exploitative, and often responsible for the destruction of entire wild dolphin pods.
In three separate incidences, the team also documented whales caught in the offshore fishing nets (called “set nets”). While one whale, a humpback, was released, a minke whale was deliberately drowned after being trapped for 19 days. A third whale, another humpback, was found dead. This isn’t the first time we have seen whales entangled in the sets nets off Taiji, but the number of incidences involving non-targeted species is alarming.
On a positive note, almost four years and ten months after I was deported from Japan, the decision of the Tokyo High Court to revoke the deportation order by the Ministry of Justice is now effective. In a judgement for the case of O’Barry versus Japan, the court ruled in my favor, citing that both my denial of entry (dated January 20, 2016) and deportation (dated February 5, 2016) were without legal merit. The Japanese government attempted to appeal this decision, however, the Supreme Court did not accept the appeal. When it is safe to do so, I am looking forward to visiting Japan.
Compared to the 2019/20 dolphin hunting season, while we cannot know the reason for the decrease in numbers, 37 fewer dolphins were taken captive. Thus, it’s imperative that we continue to keep the pressure on by educating the world why we need to say NO to the dolphin show.
Dolphin Project and Life Investigation Agency are grateful to each of you who lent your voices in support. While the drive season has “technically” ended, permits to hunt pilot whales are valid for several more months.
We hope you will continue to stand by Dolphin Project’s side as we continue our work across the globe, from the United States to the Solomon Islands and to Indonesia, where three dolphins are currently rehabilitating at the Umah Lumba Center in Banyuwedang Bay, West Bali, the first ever permanent dolphin rehabilitation, release and retirement facility for captive dolphins.
All of our groundbreaking work is made possible because of your generous support. Thank you for being a dolphin defender!
‘One mans terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’
“A particularly brutal process called “ventilation shutdown,” or VSD. Workers sealed off airways while pumping steam into the barns, intensifying the heat — over the course of many hours — to the point at which the pigs died from suffocation and/or hyperthermia”.
Source The Intercept: “…making it quite possible that some pigs survived, and are therefore buried alive or crushed by the bulldozers that haul away the corpses.”
Let’s be clear: all animal slaughter is inherently abusive and cruel and causes fear and suffering regardless of how humans, who will never be subjected to the same violent fate, define it. Those who are horrified by ventilation shutdown yet not “commonly accepted” forms of slaughter are actually just using one form of cruelty to justify another.
Please visit HERE to learn of the violence inherent in the animal exploitation industry regardless of how you define such, and before you reject footage as “the exception” (it’s not) or based on vegan “propaganda” (versus nothing provided by the animal exploiters) just remember: the “animal agriculture industry” relies on and actively pursues consumer ignorance, willful or not, and DO NOT release their own footage. Ask yourself why that is: if they are humane, they can prove it, but are unable to, and rather than use funds supporting “humane treatment” they use money to hide their deception, cruelty, greed, and intentional participation in abject suffering. That is why you will never see the an-ag industry actually demonstrate “humane treatment” before or during the killing; they instead hide the barbarism and focus on those who are exposing it.
Last June, Noel Williams, the chief operations officer of Iowa Select Farms, a powerful pork company and the largest in Iowa, pulled into the parking lot of an empty housing complex typically used for the firm’s immigrant workforce.
He was there to transport Lucas Walker, a former truck driver for Iowa Select, to a meeting with Nick Potratz, an FBI agent from the Des Moines office of the bureau. That’s according to Walker, who had recently tried to report Iowa Select, his former employer, for mistreating animals. After The Intercept published leaked video of pigs being killed off en masse, Walker came under scrutiny.
Now, the FBI had a favor to ask: Would Walker become an informant? More specifically, they wanted him to help in an effort to investigate and undermine an activist group that had become a thorn in Iowa Select’s side. They even asked if he’d be willing to sell drugs.
The saga that brought him into contact with the FBI began when the 26-year-old grew frustrated with his former employer, Iowa Select, which is headquartered in his hometown of Iowa Falls. Walker thought the company was blatantly disregarding state “double stocking” rules, which limit the size and number of pigs that are held in an intensive animal feeding facility, letting overweight pigs crowd into pens far too small to hold them.
He was tired of what he saw as frequent rule-breaking and disregard for the well-being of the tens of thousands of hogs raised by Iowa Select. The company, in his view, seemed hellbent on expansion and profits, leading to rampant overcrowding and water pollution. That rapid expansion led to the annual production of 1.5 billion pounds of pork a year, a global leader before the pandemic. The novel coronavirus, however, closed regional slaughterhouses, creating a glut of pigs.
He decided to speak out and called state regulators.
Walker doesn’t fit the profile of an animal rights activist. The central Iowa-raised truck driver, who jokingly refers to himself as corn-fed with beer running through his veins, is a fervent Trump and NRA supporter who has spent years working in the state’s maze of hog production facilities. He describes himself as independent-minded with libertarian instincts, with a bit of a contrarian side suspicious of organized power.
“I’m not necessarily animal rights by any means,” said Walker in an interview with The Intercept. “I have a cattle herd — small calf herd — and my wife and myself have some free-range pigs ourselves.”
“It was a moral issue at the heart of it. … I’m the kind of person who knows right from wrong. It was a principled thing.”
Iowa’s Department of Natural Resources, the local farm regulator, Walker felt, did not seem to care about his concerns over the phone or show any interest in enforcement on a company like Iowa Select. Iowa, followed by North Carolina and Minnesota, is the largest pork-producing state in the country and infamously deferential to industry. Iowa officials have faced criticism for failing to regulate concentrated pork facilities for water pollution and poor animal welfare standards.
Jeff Hansen, the founder of Iowa Select, built the pork powerhouse first as a salesman, helping distribute modern farrowing crates, automatic feeders, and other livestock equipment to other pig farmers in the state. He built two companies at once: a turnkey construction firm known as Modern Hog Concepts, which helped farmers upgrade their barns into modern factory farms, and Iowa Select, which raised pigs for slaughter.
Along the way, as he grew his business empire, Hansen built close connections with Iowa’s political elite. In 1994, during a cycle in which Hansen was one of the largest campaign contributors to then-Gov. Terry Branstad, he had set aside employee money for campaign contributions to local Republicans. The resulting scandal forced lawmakers to return campaign funds to Iowa Select, but the company continued to grow.
The owners of Iowa Select, Jeff and his wife Debra Hansen, are still among the largest campaign contributors in the state, and close to Gov. Kim Reynolds. A recent donation of $50,000 brought the total the couple has donated to the governor to nearly $300,000.
The governor has maintained cozy ties to Iowa Select. Shortly after her election in 2018, Reynolds volunteered to auction off her time as a gift to the Hansen family foundation. In the early days of the pandemic, her administration arranged a Covid-19 testing site at a corporate office used by white-collar Iowa Select employees and foundation employees, raising concerns with one Polk County supervisor of special treatment for the campaign donor.
And Kayla Lyon, who Reynolds appointed to run the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, which inspects hog farms for compliance with animal welfare and environmental rules, is a former dairy industry official and agribusiness lobbyist. Lyon, in her previous capacity as an influence peddler in Des Moines, had worked to pass the 2012 “ag gag” law that criminalized recording at farm facilities, according to lobbyist disclosures. Lyon lobbied at a time when Iowa Select’s lobbyists in Des Moines pushed for the bill, records show.
The impetus for that bill, which was designed to criminally prosecute whistleblowers at factory farming operations, also started in part with Iowa Select. The year before the bill was signed into law, an animal rights activist group, Mercy for Animals, released an undercover video that showed Iowa Select workers ripping the testicles from conscious piglets, removing tails with dull clippers, and scores of sows in small confinement cages, appearing to suffer from untreated sores and other wounds.
The law, though later overturned by a federal court, was the first of its kind and rapidly inspired copycat legislation across the country.
Walker’s failed attempts to reach regulators, to report overcrowding in Iowa Select facilities, didn’t surprise him. “The DNR wasn’t very interested in talking about it,” said Walker. “They’re too big to be regulated.”
“There have been no recent enforcement actions against Iowa Select Farms. Nor are we aware of any complaints or allegations made to the DNR,” Alex Murphy, a spokesperson for the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, said in an email to The Intercept.
Walker, aware that he had few outlets for help, turned to the internet to research whistleblowing resources for factory farms. That’s how he found Direct Action Everywhere, the Berkeley, California-based group that has worked to expose the shocking treatment of animals in factory farms.
4000 turtles could be saved from freezing to death!
On an island in southern Texas, more than 4000 sea turtles have been rescued from the cooled water in the Gulf of Mexico in the past few days and temporarily housed in a conference center to warm up there.
Foto: Miguel Roberts/dpa
The severe onset of winter in the US state of Texas triggered a large-scale rescue operation for thousands of sea turtles.
The organization Sea Turtle Inc, which cares for the protection of sea turtles in the region, started the rescue operation.
The animals were spread out on plastic sheets in rooms and corridors of the congress center.
Sea Turtle’sSanjuana Zavala told the German Press Agency on Thursday that the turtles were in a kind of rigidity in which they could not move, eat and drink until they were warmed up again.
This state lasted for several days. “We just have to wait and see now.”
There are real heavyweights among the turtles
The animals don’t necessarily have to be in the water in this state, emphasized Zavala.
In the beginning, they used the children’s paddling pool for some of the rescued turtles. But given a large number of animals, there weren’t enough such tanks.
As soon as the water temperature in the sea rises above 12 degrees Celsius again, the animals could be brought back there. The rescued turtles would have a weight of up to 180 kilograms.
A severe onset of winter is currently plaguing large parts of the United States and has led to massive power outages. The state of Texas in the south of the country is the hardest hit.
South Padre Island is near the US border with Mexico.
Zavala said that in the past few years her organization had occasionally had to rescue turtles from the sea in winter. But it was never more than 200 at a time. “We have never had it to this extent.”
Therefore one had to switch to the congress center. There, too, there were temporary problems with the electricity in view of the snowstorm.
But in the building, the turtles are protected from wind and weather and protected from the cold water in the sea.
We are trying to promote a Vegan plant based lifestyle on this site; and to show you the realities of what goes on with ‘the other side’ – meat production, involving live animal transport; the dairy industry etc.
WAV is not a cookery site, but given the chance; we will give links to other sites and areas where you can delve deeper into the easy world of going Vegan.
So; now we are established a bit more, its time for a change, and a change which we hope will be of benefit.
On the site from today there will be a new section called ‘Vegan / Recipes’. Here we will be giving you all further insight into the way forward to making veganism very easy; and cutting out meat and dairy. It should be a cool place for new, aspiring, and ready to be vegans.
So if you are a foodie, or are looking for new ideas to broaden your already existing vegan diet, we hope this section will be of use to you. Recipes and links will continue to be included in general news for a time, but gradually we hope to place all vegan diet related posts into this area. Check it out; we will be transferring existing posts to the new area over the coming days as a starter anyway.
At the end of January 2021, a raccoon was shot in Appenzell Innerhodischen Wasserauen.
He stayed “illegally” on Swisssoil and looked for food in a house. The raccoon was healthy.
He was peaceful and did not attack or put anyone in danger.
The federal law on hunting and the protection of wild mammals and birds allows raccoons to be shot all year round.
They are not at home in Switzerland and could unbalance the ecological balance that has been devised and prescribed by humans.
In “specialist circles” they are listed as neo-zones, that is to say, “introduced and alien animal species” or clearly expressed as “animal non grata”.
Speciesism versus the raccoon
All over the world people are still discriminated against, humiliated, and often persecuted because of their origin and skin color.
In Switzerland, the racist criminal norm rightly prohibits discrimination against people on the basis of their ethnicity, skin color, and religion.
Because no one is better than the other. We all have the right to life and to be treated with respect and decency, no matter where we come from and what skin color or religion we have.
With animals, however, it looks different.
No protection is granted to non-resident animals: they are undesirable and “worthless”, although they too are no longer considered a thing.
Their right to life is denied to them by law because of their origin and in the name of the ecological balance dictated by humans.
This is lived “speciesism”, which means: the human being shows with his attitude towards alien animals once again that he is convinced that he is superior to all other species due to his nature and can therefore treat them as he wants. This attitude is more than reprehensible and can no longer be accepted. Together for the protection of raccoons on Swiss soil
The PETITION aims to protect raccoons in Switzerland.
Raccoons should no longer be hunted and killed because of their origin. The right to life should apply to them too.
In order to prevent an overpopulation of raccoons and to protect the local biodiversity, the possibility of an oral contraceptive for the female raccoons should be examined.
And I mean...” On the basis of being human” everyone has the right to life, to freedom, to integrity, to protection from discrimination, torture, and much more.
When it comes to animal rights, things get more difficult.
Humans are brought up with the principle of Suprematism, which says that humans are a very special animal that must by no means be mentioned in the same breath as the others.
Therefore the favored species is always the human.
Humans have rights, all other animal species have no rights.
The best thing that could happen to the raccoon would be a grace, which however would not belong to his rights, but is subject to the goodwill of the perpetrator.
We are a society of perpetrators who decide about the life and death of the weaker and also show solidarity with the perpetrator.
Those who belong to the privileged class do not know how it feels to be constantly under the power and violence of the ruler.
Therefore: we fight for the rights of those who have none, the rights of animals.
We stay on the right side
This day of honor for the large marine mammals was initiated by animal rights activists on the island of Maui and has been celebrated there since 1980.
It coincides with the time when a large number of humpback whales roam the coast of Hawaii to give birth and raise their young.
The day is meant to indicate the threat posed by these majestic giants.
🐋 They are mysterious, intelligent, and breathe oxygen through their lungs – just like us, humans!
But the gentle giants of the oceans are in danger: illegal fishing, noise, traffic, and environmental pollution threaten the fascinating mammals.
Whales around the world need intensive protection so that we don’t lose them forever!
We keep fighting to save these animals from extinction!
Sea Shepherd Germany
when the ocean dies we die too! we all have to help to save our oceans and their residents.
The inhabitants of Mwingi and Bolesa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo need our help: Local activists were jailed after a protest against PHC, a palm oil company.
To: the authorities of the Democratic Republic of the Congo
“We demand the release of the activists and an end to violence and land grabbing. Local people must finally get their land rights and the right to free consent.” Read letter
Communities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have suffered under palm oil companies for decades, and violence has erupted time and again: In 2015, a couple accused of stealing palm oil fruits was killed, and in 2019, the villager Joel Imbangola was beaten to death.
In February 2021, following a protest march against the palm oil company PHC, villagers, including local members of RIAO-RDC, were beaten and jailed.
Two reportedly received death threats, and women were sexually assaulted.
The occasion for the protest march was an anticipated visit by Kalaa Mpinga, the new CEO of Feronia-PHC. His Mauritius-registered corporation took over the plantations in 2020.
The villagers are accused of “inciting revolt”. Their taking photos of the protest march and giving interviews to journalists is also being held against them.
The roots of the conflict go back 110 years when the first plantations were established.
The local people were never consulted but were simply robbed of their ancestral land and thus their livelihood.
alligator mississippiensis
alligator mississippiensis
World Animals Voice 