For many of us who are aware of the multitude of ways that animals suffer at the hands of humans around the world, this ubiquitous cruelty is the most pressing social justice issue of them all. From declawing to debeaking, ear clipping to tail docking, the suffering that human beings inflict on animals being used for food, clothing, research, ‘pets’ and entertainment appears to know no bounds, and the many brutal ways in which we force animals to succumb to our desires appear to be limited only by the scope of our imaginations.

But why does all this cruelty take place? And what can we do about this horrifying brutality as individuals? It’s easy
to point the finger at the direct perpetrators of animal cruelty as being villains who need to be brought to justice. It’s much harder – and yet much more significant – to turn that critical eye inward and ask oneself, ‘What am I doing to contribute to this?’ But it is only by asking that question that the path toward emancipation from barbaric injustice becomes clear.

The vast majority of the time, money and effort of animal welfare organizations goes toward trying to develop new laws and regulations to address the many separate issues relating to animal cruelty, while at the same time trying to force the industry to adhere to those currently in place. As explained in Are Anti-Cruelty Campaigns Really Effective?, these efforts consistently fail to create any significant improvement for animals.

Behind these campaigns lies a hidden assumption that the animal industry is responsible for animal cruelty. But is this assumption warranted? Isn’t industry simply a middle agent put in place to do the dirty deeds requested by consumers of animal products? Although it’s true that the animal industry is an eager and aggressive middle agent, its role is only that of middle agent. As such, while institutionalized exploiters certainly have a lot to answer for, it is consumers who are primarily responsible for animal cruelty through their purchases of animal products.

Many people will likely respond that their concern is not with the rights of animals not to be enslaved and killed, but with the excessive brutality in the animal industry; gratuitous violence for instance, and the cruelty that is inflicted on animals along the way to being slaughtered and butchered – debeaking, dehorning, detoeing, mulesing, castration, tail docking, etc. But as long as our society continues to treat animals as property and economic commodities, our legal system will continue to accept such mutilations as a necessary evil on the way to providing goods and services to a human population largely indifferent to what is hidden behind remote sheds and slaughterhouses.

In any case, even if we did find some way to eliminate every single practice involving physical mutilation, it’s impossible to make slavery and murder anything other than slavery and murder. We can slap fancy labels on the products of animal misery and market them as ‘humanely-raised’, ‘animal compassionate’, ‘ethically-produced’ or ‘guilt-free’, but needless killing is needless killing, and no amount of regulation can change that.

It is understandable that individual stories of horrific suffering make people want to seek out the perpetrators, bring them to justice, and protect potential victims from experiencing the same treatment. But pointing the finger at institutional exploiters ignores the most significant issue – that no matter what the suppliers do along the way, consumption of animal products ultimately requires taking animals’ lives.

How can we expect morally decent behavior from the people we ask to carry out the task of breeding, confining and ultimately killing and butchering the animals we choose to enslave and eat? These are innocent beings who most people would rather and embrace than hurt and kill.

There is something very unjust about the fact that we delegate the most obscene work of our society to a select few who are emotionally hardened enough to carry it out, only to later denigrate them for their disconnection from their natural sense of empathy. When thinking about it honestly, most of us would be hard-pressed to find it in ourselves to slaughter an animal – or to rip off her skin, or slice open her body to remove the entrails, or butcher her flesh into supermarket-sized pieces… And yet, we continue to ask others to do it for us, while most people refuse to even watch these things on video or hear others describe them.

But our distaste toward being involved in such violent acts isn’t something that should be squelched and suppressed, as Michael Pollan or Julie Powell would have us believe. No – we should be grateful for the revulsion we feel when we imagine what happens to animals in between being born and being on our plates. Our horror is a sane reaction to practices that are nothing short of horrifying.

We cannot separate ourselves from depravity simply because we have found a way to tuck the dirty deeds out of sight – behind the walls of slaughterhouses and other obscure buildings. And all the disconnection and indifference in the world cannot change the fact that it is impossible to distinguish the immorality of a Pollan-style DIY approach from the immorality of any other act of unnecessary violence.

In any court of law, those who are complicit in a crime are considered to be responsible along with those who carry it out.

As expressed so eloquently by Ralph Waldo Emerson,

“You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.”
…

Angel Flinn is Director of Outreach for Gentle World — a vegan intentional community and non-profit organization whose core purpose is to help build a more peaceful society, by educating the public about the reasons for being vegan, the benefits of vegan living, and how to go about making such a transition.

Dan Cudahy is author of Unpopular Vegan Essays: Unpopular Essays Concerning Popular Violence Inflicted On The Innocent.

It turns out that suffering-free cheese is nearly impossible to come by. The problem for sympathetic vegetarians begins with the sourcing of milk. In factory farming dairies, milk cows are typically dosed with bovine growth hormone (BGH) to push milk production to 70 pounds per day or more. BGH promotes mastitis, a painful inflammation of the udder. Then there’s routine dosing with antibiotics to compensate for the spread of diseases on giant, crowded feedlots.

The natural life span of dairy cows is 20-25 years but they are slaughtered at four or five years because they are lame from confinement or otherwise “used up.” A spokesperson for organic milk says their milk cows are generally allowed to live a few years longer than those on factory farms but are still slaughtered for beef well before the end of their natural lives.

And there is still the issue of what happens to male calves. Milk cows have to be re-impregnated about once a year to maintain milk production, and only the female calves have value as replacement milk cows. In factory farms, male calves are slated for veal production or castrated without painkillers, fattened to maturity and slaughtered.

This story is sourced from the USA but the issues remain the same: vegetarian rennet or not, have you thought through all your eating choices?

People sent in thousands of photos and hundreds of videos from around the world — and we wish we could have used them all in the video. Images are how we turn local action into global inspiration — inspiration that can help the whole world move together.

Your pictures are also a crucial way to bring the pressure of this movement to bear on the political process. Next week, members of the 350 team will be in Panama using Moving Planet photos at global climate negotations. Our 350 crew will be delivering photo packets to delegates from around the world, and setting up massive photo displays to help breathe new life and determination into a forum that desperately needs it.

So if you haven’t yet, click here to share your photos, and click here to share your videos — and we’ll put them to work.

We’ll be in touch, of course, about what happens next — movements need to keep moving, and now that we’ve got the earth in motion we can’t let it slow down.

We’ve got big plans in the works: in the USA, we’ll be ramping up the pressure to stop the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. On the global level, we’ll be shining a spotlight on Africa in the lead up to the UN climate meeting in Durban coming up this November. And in communities around the world, we’ll be rolling out powerful climate leadership workshops, grassroots education programs, and hard-hitting local campaigns that will help us build local power from the bottom up.

But this week is a time simply to appreciate what’s been accomplished, and we hope this video does the trick.

We want to say thank you one more time. Watching it all unfold, we felt like the world was truly coming together. We couldn’t be more grateful to be building this movement with all of you.

Onwards,

Bill McKibben for the whole 350.org team

P.S. This video deserves to be spread far and wide — take a minute to spread it on Facebook and Twitter with just a couple of clicks.

Source: PCRM: Dr Neal Barnard’s Blog 7/6/2011

Last month, the National Institutes of Health stopped a clinical trial a year and a half early because the drug under study—an extended-release form of niacin—proved ineffective for preventing heart attacks and strokes. Marketed as Niaspan, the drug increases high-density lipoprotein (HDL or “good” cholesterol). However, it showed no benefit at all in the $52.7 million AIM-HIGH study, which included 3,414 individuals with a history of cardiovascular disease, so the study was stopped.

In response, research leaders began wringing their hands, wondering what could be done. The Washington Post quoted Susan B. Shurin, acting director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, which funded the study, saying, “This sends us a bit back to the drawing board.” Ralph Sacco, president of the American Heart Association, lamented, “We are always looking for new, more effective ways to reduce cardiovascular risks. It’s disappointing.”

The answer is to close the medicine cabinet and open the kitchen cabinet. More than 20 years ago, Dr. Dean Ornish showed that a vegetarian diet, along with other healthful lifestyle factors could reverse heart disease and dramatically cut the long-term risk of attacks and other cardiovascular problems. Other research teams have shown similar results. An entirely plant-based diet has no animal fat and no cholesterol, and is rich in soluble fiber that helps reduce cholesterol.

Niacin is often used in hopes of raising the ratio of “good” cholesterol to “bad” cholesterol, that is boosting HDL and reducing LDL. However, a healthy diet accomplishes much the same. A plant-based diet typically reduces LDL so much that the ratio improves. Studies have also shown that exercise can boost HDL.

So rather than hope for more and better drugs to combat a disease that is largely caused by diet and lifestyle, it is time to address the causes directly. By prying ourselves away from animal-derived food products and building our menu from vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and legumes, we will go a long way toward eliminating heart disease.

US Department of Health and Human Services. NIH stops clinical trial on combination cholesterol treatment. NIH News. National Institutes of Health. May 26, 2011.

You can watch Bill’s story and cast your vote at Ban Live Export

(Please note that the second half of the video is very difficult to watch.)

If you can’t bear to watch all of the video, you can still protest about this. There is a form letter to sign, or you can write your own, and you can share it through Facebook or Twitter. Please do this – we can make a difference from here.

Since PCRM launched its public effort on Mass General in October 2009 with a peaceful demonstration in Boston, you and others have sent more than 38,000 e-mails to hospital leadership. Now we need to keep that momentum going. Please take a moment to ask the president of Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Mass., to end its use of pigs in ATLS training immediately.

Baystate is currently the only ATLS program in Massachusetts—and one of the last in all of the United States and Canada—that continues to use live animals. The American College of Surgeons, which oversees ATLS courses, has approved the use of human patient simulators such as the TraumaMan System to teach these courses, but at Baystate, trainees learn on live animals. After numerous invasive procedures are practiced on the animals, they are killed. Baystate continue to use pigs for this training despite the fact that it already owns the TraumaMan System simulator.

So far, the responsible faculty members and administrators have ignored our pleas to change their methods. Please contact the president of Baystate today.

Thank you for all of your help and for all that you do for animals.

We’ve just hear that Gregg’s Jelly Time cold water jelly, which is a gelatine free jelly, is no longer being made because it wasn’t selling enough. Did you ever see them market it to us? Many of us did know about it and it had been mentioned in our email list snippets when it first came out, but now that the conversation has started about it, we’ve heard that a lot of you didn’t  know, and would have bought it. I’d like to insert a plug here for companies to use the Vegetarian Trademark – that one tick on the product packaging says it all.

It may be too late for this jelly, but  do try contacting Gregg’s on 0800 765 765 or at csc@cerebusgreggs.co.nz.  We have to let companies know that we’re out here so get in touch with them! This has worked for us in the past.

We are as excited as you that our campaigns have paid off. It’s numbers that count and the importers don’t know we’re out here unless we show them. Businesses often ring us for our membership statistics so make your voice count – join us. You can make a difference