WAV Comment – Today, 22nd March 2021, is the United Nations ‘World Water Day’.  Philip is a personal friend and fellow campaigner, CEO of Compassion In World Farming (England) who we have worked with for around 30 years.  Here he describes entering the ‘Dead Zone’.

Philip Lymbery | Water and Welfare

Today, 22nd March 2021, is the United Nations World Water Day. It’s about raising awareness of the value of water and the importance of protecting this vital resource on which we all depend.

For me World Water Day brings back memories of my investigations in the USA whilst writing Dead Zone: Where the Wild Things Were, where I witnessed for myself how intensive livestock production fuels water pollution around the globe.

I had travelled about 15 miles out in the Gulf of Mexico and was looking at something resembling a construction site. All around me were oil rigs. I’d heard a lot about this place in the middle of nowhere from the media. A place out at sea where nothing lives. Called the ‘dead zone’. An expanse of water so polluted that nearly all the oxygen has gone. A liquid symbol of what happens when efforts to prevent, mitigate or contain environmental damage fail and the water represents worst-case scenario; the marine ‘end of days’. The gathering body of oxygen-depleted – hypoxic – water forms a barrier to life, killing just about everything that can’t flee.

My plan had been to see the dead zone for myself – and not from the comfort of a boat. So snorkel fixed, I slipped into the water. At surface level the pea-green sea looked nothing out of the ordinary. As I peered into the gloom below, I could see fish and the water around me looked very much alive. Had there been some mistake? I ducked down again and held my breath this time, swimming down. Now things began to grow clearer – or rather not. A few metres beneath the surface, everything changed. The water was cooler, saltier and far more murky. I could see very little and without diving kit, I could go no further. I wouldn’t reach the dead zone myself, for it was far, far below, coating the bottom half of the water in a suffocating blanket.

Sadly, the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is not unique – they exist all over the world but among biologists, marine scientists and conservationists, it is among the most notorious. It now boasts the world’s second-largest area of oxygen-depleted water (the Baltic is the biggest). It’s a squalid claim to fame. The zone emerges every year, without fail, from February to October, stretching all the way from the shores of Louisiana to the upper Texan coast.

And the main culprit? Fertiliser.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) the source of the problem is the ‘flowing green oceans’ of corn in the Midwest of America. It is an area of intensive corn and soybean production, where large amounts of nitrogen from fertiliser and manure are applied to the soils every year. Excess nitrate is washed into rivers and streams and ends up in the Gulf. One would think the corn and soya would be feeding the world, but you’d be wrong, it’s feeding factory farmed animals. The problems in the Gulf are squarely linked to the food on our plates.

The reality of all this was brought home to me when I took to the air in a tiny Cessna plane. I was expecting various warehouses with impressive pallet-stacks of fertiliser bags, but we flew over a small town of sprawling industry, one of many perched on the banks of the Mississippi and to my horror, they were all fertiliser factories. But the term ‘fertiliser factory’ entirely failed to convey the sheer scale of this hidden part of the industrial farming jigsaw.

Dead zones are emerging around the world. Industrial agriculture systems, with their high dependence on artificial fertilisers and chemicals, are a major source of pollution of our precious water. Quite simply our hunger for ‘cheap’ meat from animals fed on cheap corn grown on chemical-laced fields is poisoning and driving out precious species and damaging ecosystems on land, rivers and sea. But it’s not too late to reverse the situation – a reduction in meat, dairy and egg consumption especially from factory farms, can reduce the water impact of our diets and greatly improve the welfare of farm animals.

This is why we need to seize the opportunity of this year’s United Nations Food Systems Summit to move toward a global agreement to end factory farming. To reset our food system towards regenerative, restorative, nature-friendly ways of producing food. The UN summit presents an incredible opportunity to focus this debate in one place and form the catalyst for change on a global basis.

Please join us and become a food systems hero.

Thank you.

Note: For more information and to watch the video ‘The Downstream Disaster’ from the Dead Zone series of films, please click here 

Human meat for sale during animal rights protest in Barcelona

Animals rights campaigners organised a “humans sold as meat” protest in Barcelona on Saturday. Naked protesters were covered in fake blood, lying on white trays under plastic sheeting, replicating animal meat for sale. 

On the plastic sheeting, there were “Human Meat” stickers with a barcode and price on them, just like you would find meat in the supermarket.

“We are fighting against the suffering of animals,” Cristina Ibañez from the Spanish animal welfare organization AnimaNaturalis told Reuters. “For their right to life, they want to live the way this person who is walking wants to live, or just like I want to live.”

“That’s why it’s not fair, and it’s nutritionally unnecessary that we continue to exploit and kill animals just to satisfy our appetite,” Ibañez said.

The protest was staged outside the famous ‘La Boqueria’ market, which has several meat vendors. “You can live without eating meat, and it’s very important to do this because animals suffer a lot throughout the meat production process,” one of the protestors, Andrea, said.

The demonstration was on the same day as MeatOut Day, an event on the first day of spring to promote a vegan lifestyle, originally started in the United States in 1985 to question the consumption of animal products worldwide.

“MeatOut was designed to remind us of animal agriculture’s devastating impact to the animals, our health, and the environment,” they say on their website.

“Theologians have long debated whether there is life after death. For animals on factory farms, there is no life before death.”

Human meat for sale during animal rights protest in Barcelona (theanimalreader.com)

As matadors return to the ring amid Covid restrictions, campaigners say it is time bullfighting was outlawed

Seen as an art by admirers in Spain, bullfighting has met with fierce criticism in recent years from an emboldened animal rights lobby which has been supported by left-wing parties

As matadors return to the ring amid Covid restrictions, campaigners say it is time bullfighting was outlawed (inews.co.uk)

When Diego Urdiales put on the gold traje de luces (suit of lights) and bright pink stockings for the first time in over a year, he had mixed emotions. “I was scared, yes. I had been thinking about the fight for weeks. There is a responsibility to the public, to the bull,” the matador said the day after coming face-to-face with half-tonne bulls. 

“The situation is complicated right now with Covid-19. It was good to return to la corrida, of course, but I had a mixture of feelings as I had been away from the ring for so long.”

Urdiales did not disappoint his fans and killed his first bull, named Elegante, with ease. Covid-19 restrictions meant only 20 per cent of the normal crowd could watch the victory at the ring at Ubrique, in southern Spain on Sunday.

As bullfighting makes a tentative return with smaller crowds, questions remain – even among supporters – about the future of what Spaniards call la fiesta nacional.

Seen as an art by admirers in Spain, bullfighting has met with fierce criticism in recent years from an emboldened animal rights lobby which has been supported by left-wing parties.

Now after the pandemic has banished the crowds and pushed the industry onto the ropes, matadors, breeders and promoters are staging a fight-back.

“There are more young people at the bullfights than ever before,” insists Urdiales, who is considered one of the best matadors in Spain by admirers.

The slow decline of a spectacle lionised by the likes of Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway is illustrated in the number of bullfights held in Spain over the past decade. In 2012, there were 1,997 fights but this figure fell to 1,425 by 2019, according to Spain’s ministry of culture.

Ruben Amon, a journalist and author of End of the Fiesta, a book about bullfighting, says the art has been badly misunderstood. “It is under an ideological, cultural and political threat,” he says. “Ideological because bullfighting is linked to the political right. Cultural because they will always find ways to get rid of it by saying it is not civilised. Lastly, political because a progressive government seeks ways to rid Spain of the second most popular mass spectacle.”

Amon, an aficionado all his life who also wrote a biography of Plácido Domingo, contends that rearing bulls on huge farms is far kinder to the animals than factory farming of chicken or pigs.

“There are only 2,500 bulls killed every year but there are tens of thousands of pigs or chicken slaughtered,” he said. Another misunderstanding, he claims, is that bullfighting is a man’s world, from which women are excluded.

“It is a masculine world but not a macho world,” he says. Some 245 women work in an industry which employs about 15,000 people, according to government figures.

Amon also suggests there are gay bullfighters who are scared to emerge from the closet. “I know gay bullfighters but they do not want to go public, just like in basketball or football. It is still not easy for homosexuals to come out.”

José Zaldivar is under no illusion about the true nature of bullfighting.

The vet has been campaigning to end what he calls torture. In his office in Madrid, he has a veritable arsenal used by the matador to do battle with the bull, from the sword which ends its life to the banderillas which are punctured into the animal’s back to weaken it.

“In Spain, our law protects animals from cruelty except those which are used in public spectacles like bullfighting,” Zaldivar tells i. “There is no doubt in my mind that the bull is subjected to stress, pain and injuries which I would call torture.”

Zaldivar, who is president of the Association of Veterinarians for the Abolition of Bullfighting, holds out little hope that the spectacle will end in Spain unless its status as part of the cultural heritage is withdrawn.

In 2013, the then conservative government passed a law which established the cultural character of bullfighting as “indisputable”.

This meant in 2016, a ban on bullfighting in Catalonia was annulled by the Constitutional Court, which ruled it undermined the state law on cultural heritage. It meant regional governments could regulate but not ban bullfights.

An attempt to hold bloodless bullfights in Majorca was overruled by the court which said the animals must die or the true nature of the bullfights would be lost.

Torture is Not Culture, an animal rights group, claims that the bloody spectacle could not survive without grants from the European Union Common Agricultural Policy which, they claim, amounted to €130m last year.

However, if the economic damage inflicted by the Covid-19 pandemic has not signed the death knell for bullfighting, some within the industry believe growing indifference may deliver the estocada – the death blow in bullfighting parlance.

Antonio Lorca, the bullfighting critic of El País newspaper, said that bullfighting will recover after the pandemic, but it will never be the same again.

“The biggest problem is the younger generation has so many other things to be interested in,” Lorca told i. “My own daughter is not interested in bulls. She prefers films and music. I think it will become something for a minority and for tourists.”