The horror is ongoing. Once again, our apologies. It is important to note, and please read comments below, the connection between abusing/killing Animals and the intent to do same to Humans (women). How this ends we have seen only recently in Oxford/UK with the Chinese woman Scarlet Blake, now jailed for life.
Please refer to our earlier posts on the subject for more info, thanks,
Europe’s 340 million pets are unlikely to swing this year’s European elections, though with cats, one can never be sure. Jennifer Baker looks at Europe’s animal-related policy dynamics and how they could influence June’s electoral mix.
2024 is a bumper year for elections around the globe. In Europe, the cost of living, energy, environment, and migration are among the top concerns of voters at a national level. With the European Parliament, voting intentions can be a little different, allowing for broader areas of concern where local party-political questions tend to be less dominant. This means issues such as animal welfare can come to the fore.
According to the European Pet Food Industry Federation (FEDIAF), European households boasted 340 million pets in 2022 – including 127 million cats and 104 million dogs – across more than 90 million homes, so it would seem we are a continent of animal lovers, and yet animal welfare is not an issue that is routinely seen as a vote winner in national politics.
Dr Joanna Swabe, senior director of public affairs for Humane Society International/Europe, explained: “Animal welfare is one of those rare issues that is neither left nor right. Across the political spectrum and irrespective of nationality, you’ll always find politicians who care about the plight of animals. It is certainly not the exclusive domain of the Greens and the Left.”
Swade remarked that over the years she’s even encountered very conservative right-wing MEPs for whom animal welfare is paramount.
In the European Parliament, the Intergroup on the Welfare and Conservation of Animals brings together more than 90 MEPs to work together to advance animal welfare and conservation in EU policy making.
Recent issues under discussion include a proposal for a regulation on the welfare of dogs and cats and their traceability, protection of wolves in the EU, the use of animals in science and a new proposal for a regulation on the protection of animals during transport.
The intergroup also advocates for Cage-Free Farming and a Fur-Free Europe, while highlighting the importance of Animal Welfare Labelling.
Catalysts for change
“MEPs can serve as catalysts to push for better animal welfare legislation,” explained Danish S&D MEP, Niels Fuglsang.
Fuglsang is one of many European Parliament candidates in the upcoming elections to have signed the Eurogroup for Animals’ “Vote for Animals” pledge: a commitment to push the European Commission to put forward ambitious legislation in areas critical to animal welfare.
Some of the legislative proposals are obvious, such as fur labelling in the revision of EU textiles Regulation. Others are more indirect. For example, the European Green Deal sets out the ambition to reach zero pollution for a toxic-free environment. The so-called REACH revision could be an opportunity to promote non-animal testing.
Landmark opportunity
And it’s not only animals’ rights groups that support better legal protection for our furry friends. Cefic, the voice of the chemical industry in Europe, described the REACH revision as a “landmark opportunity to accelerate development, validation and regulatory acceptance of human-relevant, animal-free approaches to assess safety of chemicals.”
“By making every effort to identify where animal-based testing can reliably be replaced by non-animal methodologies and reflect latest advances in science, we will create a triple win for the industry, regulators, and animal welfare. This requires a paradigm shift in safety assessment towards Next Generation safety assessment, similar to moves seen in the area of cosmetics or pharmaceuticals,” said the organisation.
The EU Pharmaceutical Package currently under co-decision could also encourage new technologies to reduce testing on live animals.
One national outlier where animal – specifically bird – welfare and safety is a hot button issue is Malta. During the last European elections in 2019, Malta’s powerful pro-hunting lobby, FKNK, urged its supporters not to abstain, but to vote for its preferred candidates.
Cannot ignore agriculture
In Malta it is the hunting lobby that pressures political parties. Elsewhere in Europe the influential farming lobby holds sway. The protests of recent weeks have shown candidates that they cannot afford to ignore the rural, agricultural vote.
The Humane Society International/Europe’s manifesto, which aims to encourage policymakers to take a more ethical stance on animal welfare, has farm animals top of its agenda.
Swabe pointed out that many politicians are happy to loudly trumpet their support for legislative action to end the illegal puppy trade but are conspicuously quiet when it comes to pigs and poultry kept on Europe’s farms.
“We are told the Commission is currently assessing whether the transition to cage-free farming is sustainable for the agricultural sector and that further consultations on, amongst other things, the costs and length of transition periods are needed,” said Swabe.
She added that for the millions of laying hens still confined to enriched battery cages, and millions of pigs who continue to languish in individual sow stalls for a significant proportion of their gestation, “ […] what is truly unsustainable is this failure to take decisive action to provide them with housing systems that meet their welfare needs.”
Calls are growing for supermarkets to remove Parma ham from their shelves after its production was linked to the mistreatment of mares on Iceland’s blood farms. At the heart of this controversy lies the extraction of equine chorionic gonadotropin (eCG), also called Pregnant Mare Serum Gonadotropin (PMSG), a hormone extracted from the blood of pregnant mares.
Italian pig farmers who supply Parma ham producers use pharmaceuticals containing eCG; a hormone that improves sow fertility and stimulates and synchronises oestrus. The sows have no time to recover in between pregnancies, which leads to early slaughter. The use of eCG leads to bigger litter sizes; if the sows have more piglets than teats, surplus piglets often starve or are killed.
Until 2017, eCG used in Italy came mainly from Argentina and Uruguay. Since then, most European pharmaceutical companies have opted for Icelandic eCG following controversy about conditions on South American blood farms.
Yet the situation in Iceland is no better: pregnant mares are crammed into pens so that up to five litres of blood can be extracted via their jugular veins every week. Previous investigations by our member Animal Welfare Foundation (AWF) have revealed poor conditions on hundreds of blood farms across Iceland, where blood is drawn from an estimated 5,000 mares from the late summer to autumn every year.
The eCG extracted from pregnant mares’ blood is exported around the world, including to EU countries (the largest importer of Icelandic eCG being Germany), to produce pharmaceuticals used on pigs in particular, as well as on sheep, cattle and goats.
The Icelandic government admitted in September 2023 that its current legal framework breached Directive 2010/63/EU on the protection of animals used for scientific purposes, and committed to correcting its failures as of November 2023.
Supermarkets should prohibit the use of eCG in their meat supply chains. If their suppliers refuse to stop using eCG, then the consequence should be to stop the import.
Sabrina Gurtner, Animal Welfare Foundation (AWF)
eCG production and use is cruel and unnecessary. There are numerous alternatives available with similar efficacy, such as simple exercise routines, optimal nutrition, lighting, contact between sows in oestrus, and contact with boars.
The EU is the main destination for Icelandic eCG and the hormone, in addition to being produced in cruel conditions, only further supports an intensive and unsustainable model of livestock farming. Eurogroup for Animals calls for an EU-wide ban on the production, import and use of eCG.
Animal Buddy Pauline has sent me some new photographs which were taken in Greenwich Park, London; home of The Royal Observatory, home of Greenwich Mean Time and the Prime Meridian, all located within Greenwich Park at the top of the steep hill overlooking the Queen’s House and the National Maritime Museum.
During Pauline’s visit to the park with her dad; who you can see feeding one of the the local urban Foxes in some great pics, she was able to take several pictures which are reproduced here. So enjoy a visit to the Royal Park of London via the links and photos;
Regards Mark and Pauline.
Pauline’s dad feeds the very tame fox:
I think that the majority of London’s urban foxes probably do well, considering the look of this guy. Some people still hate them, but many people welcome them in the City and often put out some food for them. If people see any fox(es) in trouble then there is the National Fox Welfare Society (NFWS) who can be called out for rescues anytime within the M25 region.
Here is a link to their website which provides further information and pictures. If you see a fox with mange and wish to treat it yourself, then the NFWS will send you out FREE Arsenicum / Sulphur liquid which will treat when put onto jam sandwiches and dough nuts etc. It must never be put on meat as the benefits are nullified.
Make a note of these organisations and phone numbers in case you ever need them to help you.
If like us you are based very near to London in Kent, then we have the ‘Fox Project’ who can also be contacted for advice and an emergency Southern Wildlife rescue ambulance Network.
As we (in animal rights) know from endless examples in the past and present, animal killers often start out as such and then often transverse into human killers. What of the future ???
For examples:
Jeffrey Dahmer, the “Milwaukee cannibal” who dismembered 17 people three decades ago had first practised his butchery by cutting up dogs and cats and impaling their heads on sticks.
Ian Brady, the Moors murderer who tortured and killed five children in the 1960s, boasted of killing his first cat when he was just 10, and went on to burn another cat alive, stone dogs and cut off rabbits’ heads before going on to target people.
Robert Thompson and Jon Venables would shoot pigeons with air rifles and tie rabbits to railway lines to watch them be run over – until in 1993 they killed toddlerJames Bulger.
The links between early cruelty to animals and later violent and aggressive crime have been documented for decades, and suspected by some for even longer. But now academic research has uncovered wider chilling evidence of the psychological effect on children of witnessing cruelty to animals, and prompted widespread efforts to step in and halt those at risk of escalating the trauma by acting it out against both animals and people.
She had a “fixation with violence and with knowing what it would feel like to kill someone“, the jury was told.
But the court heard how she dissected it (the cat) and put it in a blender, taking “grotesque pleasure” in doing so.
Scarlet Blake, – Photo – Thames Valley Police
Photo – Thames Valley Police – A video of the cat killing was so graphic that it could not be shown in court in an unedited form, but stills were shown of Blake smiling at the camera
The Oxford Crown Court, where Blake’s trial is being held, heard that Blake had a “fixation with violence” and a “disturbing interest in what it would be like to harm a living creature.”
Blake was born in China and moved to the UK when she was nine. In 2021, when she committed the murders of a family cat and, four months later, a man, the 25-year-old was living in Crotch Crescent, Oxford.
According to the Sky News, Scarlet Blake went out with a crate, placing food in it, to lure in a family cat. Once a cat was caught in the crate, Blake picked it up and took it back home, where she killed it.
Blake had come up with the idea of killing a cat by taking inspiration from a Netflix documentary, titled Don’t F*** With Cats. In the show, Luka Magnotta kills kittens and films the murder while New Order’s True Faith plays in the background.
True Faith by New Order.
Scarlet Blake played the same song while live-streaming herself killing and then dissecting the cat, Sky News reported.
In the live stream video, Blake is seen removing the fur and skin of the dead animal, saying:
“Here we go my little friend. Oh boy, you smell like sh*t. I can’t wait to put you through the blender.“
Here are links to our (WAV) recent posts associated with the sick perverted people who undertake cat torture for pleasure using the dark web:
There are many links over decades which associate animal murderers then going on in life to murder humans or becoming serial killers, as we give in the link above.
With all these people requesting animal torture over the dark web, one has to question what society is becoming; and more importantly, what a danger to civilised society the people are becoming. Where will they stop ?, do they ever stop ?, it appears that some governments want to appear to be doing nothing to take against those who are an obvious threat to decent people.
I don’t have most of the answers, but I know for sure that this ‘infection’ is spreading when it should be eradicated by government action and legislation; and if necessary prosecutions and name shaming; and especially by the video companies who now make endless violent films and seem to literally get away with murder. These are the people who should be setting example; not the opposite !
The more this goes on the worse it will get.
Regards Mark and Diana
It has been long thought that cruelty to animals is one of the earliest and most serious symptoms of conduct disorder, a childhood malady that is often a precursor to psychopathy. And, in fact, there is clear evidence that violent adults are more likely to have a history of animal abuse.
The “red flag” of childhood/teen animal cruelty may signal many things – a budding psychopath, a child abuse victim, or a witness to domestic violence or adult animal cruelty. Whatever the reason, though, this child is learning to use violence to get certain needs met and needs help. The longer it goes on, the harder it will be to stop.
Joni E. Johnston, Psy.D, is a clinical/forensic psychologist and private investigator who has done criminal and civil work since 1991. She has worked in a maximum security prison and for prosecutors, criminal defense attorneys and corporations. She often conducts competency to stand trial and insanity evaluations as well as risk assessments of mentally disordered offenders. She has conducted over 200 independent investigations of harassment/discrimination complaints.
Steven M. Wise was a few years into his personal injury and criminal defense law practice when Peter Singer’s groundbreaking book “Animal Liberation” changed the course of his career.
A graduate of Boston University’s School of Law, he was shaken by the bioethics professor’s accounts of how animals were treated in factory farms and by companies testing products.
“I hadn’t realized how factory farming worked, how meat comes to our plates,” Mr. Wise told the Globe in 2002.
The way “nonhuman animals were tormented in biomedical research” was also news to Mr. Wise, who told a friend: “I don’t know how to go back to not knowing this.”
So he didn’t. Mr. Wise, who spent the rest of his life arguing in courts, articles, and books that chimpanzees, elephants, whales, and other highly intelligent creatures have a fundamental right to liberty, no less than the humans who often confined or killed them, died Feb. 15 in his Coral Springs, Fla., home. He was 73.
His wife, Gail Price-Wise, told The Washington Post that the cause was glioblastoma, a form of brain cancer. He was diagnosed almost three years ago, she said, and continued to work with his Washington-based nonprofit, the Nonhuman Rights Project, through three brain surgeries and two rounds of chemotherapy.
The little-known demand for donkey skins, used in the production of ejiao (a traditional Chinese remedy), is driving a global trade that is opportunistic, brutal and unsustainable.
The Donkey Sanctuary’s new report reveals how donkeys are suffering in their millions, and animal dependent communities are severely impacted.
The Donkey Sanctuary (England) has released the Donkeys in Global Trade briefing report, which delves into the profound impact that the donkey skin trade has on donkeys across the globe and the communities that depend on them.
The report sheds light on the often overlooked but devastating consequences of the donkey skin trade, including exploitation, cruelty, and population decline.
The donkey skins are used for the production of ejiao, a traditional Chinese remedy. Production has seen an estimated 160% increase over the past 5 years, meaning that around 6 million donkeys, and potentially many more, are being killed each year to fuel the trade.
This trade places pressure on donkey populations globally. This is particularly true in Africa where many people rely on donkeys for their livelihoods, transport, agricultural operations and to access essential resources such as food and water.
Donkeys in Global Trade briefing report, The Donkey Sanctuary
The trade has become so profitable that donkey populations have dramatically declined in many animal dependent areas; for example in Kenya, it is estimated that around half the country’s donkey population was slaughtered between 2016 and 2019 in order to sell skins.
To meet the relentless demand for skins, donkeys are bought, captured or stolen, including from donkey-dependent communities. In many cases donkeys are walked for days, often across national borders; they are transported and held with scant regard for their suffering; and they are slaughtered, often in the most horrific ways.
Donkeys in Global Trade briefing report, The Donkey Sanctuary
The impacts of the trade are severe and varied, with the top concerns being:
Donkey welfare;
Wildlife crime convergence;
Biosecurity risks;
The impact on women and communities;
Implications for the Sustainable Development Goals.
Following the report’s publication, African state leaders approveda continent-wide ban on the donkey skin trade at the conclusion of the African Union summit in Ethiopia on 18 February.
“The ‘stray’ ones are not the dogs, but the leaders who have burdened Turkey for years, polarizing society with hate politics; those who turn killing and rape into a country’s culture. Enough is enough! We will not vote for politicians who make our friends enemies, who undermine the culture of living together by promising to lock them in death camps under the name of ‘natural habitat.’ We will not bow to regressive and fascist hostility policies. Living is a right. We will not submit to the reactionary and fascist hostility policies. Living is a right. Freedom for animals, humans, and the earth!” (TY/VK)
SAV – In 2005 we formed ‘Serbian Animals Voice’ (SAV) to try and be vocal for the stray cats and dogs of Serbia. The site is archived now, but is still open for anyone wishing to have a look at all our campaign work.
We are proud to be part of this effort by “Feline Guardians” to bring the monsters to justice who torture and kill cats in China, as previously reported on.
Cat abuse is a serious issue in China that requires urgent attention. Since the “Cat in Blender” incident, Telegram communities that deliberately torture animals for fun have been operating “legally” within China, evading justice and promoting young people to harm animals.
The absence of effective measures and prolonged inaction by the authorities have allowed cat abuse to become rampant, to the extent that in recent days, stray cats in internet-face stations have been seen being abused on livestreams, causing shock and distress to animal lovers worldwide. This situation is unacceptable and must be stopped immediately!
Please join us for an X demo on Friday, February 23.
– New York: 5-6pm – Los Angeles: 2-3pm – London: 10-11pm – Paris: 11-12am – Rio de Janeiro: 7-8pm – Tokyo: 6-7am (next day) – Beijing: 5-6am (next day)
Use the hashtag #StopChinaCatTorture and #CatAbusersChina to express our collective disdain and demand immediate intervention. Every tweet can drive change!
World Animals Voice 