Cats Need 9-Lives in Australia
The Australians do not play around when it comes to feral cats and fox. Hunters and land owners shoot them on sight and very serious poisons are used to try to eradicate them, all in order to try to protect native wildlife from small mammals to endemic birds. One example: 3,000 feral cats were recently shot during a 16-day period in Queensland to keep them away from a 29-square-kilometer sanctuary designed to protect the endangered greater bilby (Macrotis lagotis), a defenseless, two and half pounds marsupial that looks like a cross between a mouse and a rabbit.
The Real Snake in the Garden of Eden Was Man
Scientists say humans wiped out almost a thousand species of birds--- most of them of the big, flightless and tasty variety -- from Pacific Islands during the Holocene period as early humans arrived a thousand years before the first Europeans. I have written a little about this before -- see More People Meant Less Moa.
A Massive and Long-term Pedophilia Scandal Will Do That!
“According to Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin, in 1984, nearly 90 percent of Irish Catholics went to weekly Mass. In 2011, only 18 percent did.” Source.
Is Horse Slaughter Less Cruel Than No Slaughter?
Bloomberg editorial board member Marc Champion wonders whether the ban of horse slaughterhouses in the US has actually increased suffering for the animals, and whether there really is a good case for managing unwanted pet and feral horses as a meat market. He notes: "All things die, including horses. The attempt to prevent the U.S. from reopening slaughterhouses for the animals is surely foolish. Consider what has happened since the last horses were slaughtered in the U.S. in 2007, after Congress banned the Food and Drug Administration from funding the inspection of horse slaughterhouses. Since then, as a Bloomberg News story reports today, the number of horses that the U.S. ships out of the country to be slaughtered in other North American countries more than doubled, to 197,442. So in our anxiety to be more humane, we have subjected the animals to a long and inhumane truck ride before they meet the same end in other countries."
How Gun Paranoia is Benefiting Wildlife:
Thanks to massive amounts of wasteful gun and bullet buying by a poorly-informed public too easily manipulated by the NRA, a record $882 million in dedicated taxes was collected to be used by the states to fund wildlife and recreation protects. Over $522 million will be used to acquire or long-term lease conservation and hunting lands under the Pittman-Robertson Act. Want to know more about the Pittman Robertson program which has more than 40 MILLION acres of land set aside for citizen hunting all over the country? Just click here.
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8 comments:
The horse slaughter thing is really a choice between the lesser of two evils. Almost all horse owners oppose slaughter, but the ones who stop to think about it (or work in rescue from sale barns and see the double-deckers heading out) realize that maybe outsourcing animal slaughter is even worse for the animal in question. But nobody really has a better solution, other than owners euthanizing old or crippled horses, rather than sending them to kill auctions.
At the local hunts, old horses and horses acquired for a song are shot in the head and fed to the hounds. A grizzly business, but less grizzly than neglect and pain. Horses were the source for most of the canned dog food that was served up in the 50s, 60s and into the 70s. When tractors arrived on the scene in the U.S., something had to happen with all those millions of horses and mules. Dog food was the answer.
A bullet in the head is a good ending. Far better than anything nature would give, and just as good as chemical euthanasia. I wouldn't mind my old horse going to feed the hounds, or feed zoo animals, or whatever. It's the handling up to the point of death that bothers me and a lot of other owners. (Also, the Bute Thing is problematic.)
A captive bolt designed to stun cattle is terrible at stunning horses. A facility designed to quietly move cattle to slaughter is terrible for quietly moving horses to slaughter. IF there was a facility built to humanely slaughter horses, GREAT, but those are few and far between.
Phenylbutazone is carcinogenic, isn't approved for use in food animals, and has no withdrawal time. Most of the horses going through auctions and ending up at kill facilities in Mexico and Canada are stuffed full of bute and who knows what else. They're not raised as food animals, so they really don't have a place in the (human) food chain.
I'm not fundamentally opposed to horses as food, but there are a lot of unaddressed problems with the way Americans handle it, both ethically and practically.
The rest of the story here is this: The slaughter houses don't want the old or sick horses. They want the young ones. In fact, Canada and Mexico turn away the horses that are sick, old, or too pregnant. I'll leave it to you to guess what happens to those horses.
The question is--where are all these excess horses coming from? This isn't just about horse owners who can't care for their pets anymore. It seems that the horse industry is just as guilty as those who raise dogs. They breed more than they need and send what they don't to auction. And they don't want anyone to know how many either.
I think the developed world has plenty of meat in its menu without adding horse meat tot its plate, but Europe apparently disagrees (as is their right). But there's next to no market for it here--Most Americans are principally against eating their companion animals and they won't knowingly feed it to their dogs. So this leaves us with an international market with rapidly changing policies and a horse industry that doesn't like to be held accountable for its actions.
I think if those who keep horses (I don't mean those who keep one or two--I mean those who breed and race them, etc) had to start tracking where their horses go, we would see a sharp drop off in "unwanted" horses. They won't want the fallout.
Even the AQHA wants horse slaughter in the US again. For some reason, everyone with a mare thinks they need to breed it. It's a good thing horses only have one offspring at a time. So where do all those horses go? How do you keep people from neglecting them?
Get Temple Grandin to design a horse slaughter facility and then bring back the US.
Too many starving horses out there. Let's solve the problem. Humanely. If humans can ever manage such a thing.
Even if you design a slaughter facility that minimizes the stress and fear, the horses still have to get there. And that's the rub. Transporting to Canada/Mexico or to Oklahoma/New Mexico ... it's still a haul, and those horses won't be riding in nice show horse/race horse trailers.
There's also the issue of all the meds that are in the horses that come from the track and the show venues. Not safe to eat. But that's the Euros issue, I suppose, not mine.
I plan to have any horse of mine who has no other option/value die swiftly at home at the hands of my veterinarians. And it's something I have given much thought to, since one of my two is a broken ex-racehorse with little use except as a "pet." It costs about $500 to euth a horse and remove the body -- a little more than twice the monthly cost of keeping a horse alive. Worth every penny.
Unfortunately the cat cull you mention is an extraordinary effort. Most australians are pretty complacent about feral cats, there are even organised lobbies which claim cat culling through shooting and poisoning should be banned as cruel.
I have friends who've worked in the field and encountered animals of 8kg weight which require headshots with a .222 Winchester to humanely kill. Dumped domestic cats usually become emaciated but those who survive can produce some pretty fearsome progeny. Its been wet here the past few years, so we are seeing cats and foxes in record numbers. And don't get me started about feral dogs...
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