Posted on September 15, 2020 by Serbian Animals Voice (SAV)
France takes turtledove under protection!
Paris seems to be turning its hunting policy 180 degrees: After the use of limed rods for catching birds was banned only two weeks ago, the Supreme Administrative Courthas now completely stopped lovebird hunting.
The migratory bird has seen a dramatic decline in populations in recent decades – not least because of the completely unrestrained hunting in France and Italy.
In recent years, the Committee against Bird Murder and its partners have used campaigns and actions to draw attention to the dramatic situation with the turtledove in particular – we only submitted a complaint against France to the EU Commission this spring.
Brussels has finally taken the reins and is putting considerable pressure on the countries where endangered bird species are still allowed to be shot en masse.
This success cannot be rated highly enough, because France has so far been one of the great “hunting nations” that have blocked any progress in protecting migratory birds.
We now expect similar restrictions as with the turtle dove for species such as the curlew and the skylark.
Bloodsports exempt from ‘rule of six’ coronavirus laws
Shooting and hunting groups have been exempted from the UK Government’s new ‘rule of six’ coronavirus laws.
The government has made it illegal to “mingle” under the new law enabling the enforcement of the rule in England, which came into force on Monday. But regulations published on Sunday include a number of exemptions, which including shooting and hunting, with both listed under the physical activities people can continue with in groups of more than six.
A statement on the British Association for Shooting and Conservation says: “Shooting has been added to a list of sports that are exempt from the latest COVID-19 restrictions in England. The ‘rule of six’ restrictions brought in today in England could have disrupted game shooting which usually includes eight or more people.
However, the exemption will allow shooting to operate under COVID-safe guidance.”
Ian Bell, BASC’s chief executive, said the decision to allow shooting to continue was “the right one”. “Like other team sports, shooting is able to operate under social distancing guidance, and its benefits to the rural economy and well-being makes its inclusion significant,” he said.
A Cabinet Office COVID-19 Operations ministerial committee scheduled a meeting on Saturday with an agenda item titled: “Exemption: hunting and shooting”, according to the Huffington Post. The meeting was cancelled just hours beforehand and insiders told the publication that the meeting was axed to avoid ministers raising objections.
Former minister Tracey Crouch told the Huffington Post: “Many will find this topsy-turvy prioritisation from government. I’ve had queries about choirs, community bands, addiction therapy groups, all of whom would be worthy of an exemption and instead we are scrabbling around prioritising shooting animals. It’s bonkers.”
Posted on September 15, 2020 by Serbian Animals Voice (SAV)
Lower Austria, 2020: Pig farming with fully slatted floors – AMA certified and self-marketing (The AMA seal of approval can be used to mark foods that exceed the legal requirements in terms of quality and whose origin is clearly traceable).
But behind the scenes there are sick piglets in the aisle, injured pigs are not treated. Dirt and boredom …
Fully slatted floors are popular in Austria’s agriculture: Concrete slabs with crevices ensure that urine and feces drain off and save farmers so much work (!!!)
60 percent of all Austrian pigs never sleep on straw, but on concrete for their entire life. And that although over 80 percent of Austrians are against this practice. Because life on hard concrete not only causes animal suffering but also diseases in pig farming.
A piglet that was put to death in the corridor between the boxes.
If you ask the Austrian Agriculture Minister Köstinger about keeping pigs on so-called fully slatted floors, she refers to the role of consumers.
She puts the responsibility on the consumer.
They are not prepared to spend more money on meat from animal welfare. The consequence would be that domestic companies no longer meet the demand in the country, instead, they are imported cheaply from abroad.
But how are meat buyers supposed to know how animals live when there is even animal suffering behind the AMA seal – as the Association against Animal Factories(VgT) recently demonstrated?
Only organic farming excludes fully slatted floors.
In 2019, not even 75,000 of the 2.7 million pigs were kept on organic farms – that is just 2.8 percent of all fattening pigs.
One solution to this misery would be the complete ban on fully slatted floors, as animal rights activists have been calling for for years.
A request to this effect was rejected by the government. Only the list “Now” (Jetzt) and the SPÖ (social democratic party of Austria) agreed.
So far nothing has changed in the matter.
Pigs that live on full slits are more likely to have injuries and ulcers.
Pigs smeared with excrement, weak animals lying on the ground, and trampling over each other, pigs attacking each other, open wounds, and fist-sized ulcers.
Image VgT: “Is it really too much if we give animals at least the simplest livelihoods such as some straw?”
…asks the association.
And I mean…Yes! when it`s about corrupt politicians, it is too much.
The Agriculture Minister Köstinger has absolutely no qualifications for this post, she has climbed with connections at this function
If she wants to stay there, she has to do what her country’s meat industry orders.
Therefore, she not only allows these miserable conditions but secures them legally.
She doesn’t give a shit if 50,000 citizens of her country have signed up against this misery.
She knows (and interests) so much about democratic processes as she does about animal welfare.
Don’t forget: She is not elected by the people anyway, but by the Federal Chancellor, who protects her.
The belief that we are ruled by thieves, cheaters, and animal haters grows every day more and more…
Posted on September 14, 2020 by Serbian Animals Voice (SAV)
The meat mafia that produces our meat goes to great lengths to keep the victims invisible from their perpetrators, the consumers.
We do not see the victims of the meat industry, they are essentially invisible.
One look at the truth could endanger the system.
This is a victim of the egg industry.
This victim produces your eggs.
This is Poppy.
Nothing about her matches the myth of the happy chickens from the dirty advertising of the meat mafia.
She has no feathers to preen she is literally skin and bone.
Poppy is a battery hen, living in a cage with a lot of other hens, stands on a wire floor day and night for 18 months.
They have no natural sunlight, no access to the outdoors, or even make a nest lay.
This is allowed by law, animal prisoners live in dark dungeons and are tortured every day as if they had committed a crime.
These perverse, perfidious tortures represent the worst kind of fascism.
Fight this with all means,
otherwise, nothing will change
Posted on September 14, 2020 by Serbian Animals Voice (SAV)
With the beginning of the bird migration, the first evidence of the terrible massacres that Lebanese poachers are causing among our European migratory birds reach us again.
This picture from last week shows a group of men proudly posing for a “selfie” with over 500 freshly shot migratory birds.
The prey consists almost exclusively of species that are strictly protected in Lebanon, such as swallows, oriole, wheatear, bee-eater, woodpecker.
The photo was taken after our research in the north of the country and was uploaded to the Instagram platform last Friday.
The police anti-poaching unit has been informed.
At the same time, preparations are underway for the bird protection mission in the Lebanon Mountains, financed by the Committee against Bird Murder, which begins next week.
By the end of the month, the “Bird Guards”from our partner association SPNL, which we have trained since 2017, will monitor important train corridors and take action against poachers together with the authorities.
This is what the EU calls the opening of the hunting season, and it started on September 13th.
The annual hunting range is around 50 million birds, including around 10 million song thrushes, over 1.3 million skylarks, and around 100,000 lapwings.
Our hunters here can’t wait to start shooting down the flying travelers in the sky.
In Italy it is no different, sparrows and other songbirds are considered delicacies. Nets are set up in which the birds get caught and die in agony.
Now the massacres are coming from Lebanon.
We do not differentiate between the EU and other countries. A crime is a crime.
And we will never be tired of bringing to light the cruel crimes of hunters around the world.
Only one thing remains questionable in this particular case:
Would the Lebanese poachers present their faces so cool on the internet if they had to fear a high penalty?
Posted on September 14, 2020 by Serbian Animals Voice (SAV)
England 14/9/20.
The BBC aired a television programme last evening; called ‘Extinction’.
It involved animal campaigner and naturalist David Attenborough, and lasted for 1 hour.
Basically, the programme was based around the destruction of the environment, and the destruction of the biodiversity – the animals (big and small) which all interact to keep things as they should be.
It showed the ravages that humankind id having on the environment and the abuse and destruction of animal species.
More than anything, it was a warning to mankind and the governments who are turning the other way. The message was clear and blank; get your act together very soon or face the consequences for all mankind.
As a campaigner, I was personally pleased that the programme (sadly, the BBC usually keeps it clean and politically polite) decided to push the envelope a bit, by showing footage of caged animals at Wuhan wet markets, destruction of the Amazon rain forest, Bats, Pangolins, White Rhino; interviews with rangers in Africa, and importantly; Covid 19 overview; asking if this was the last virus we would see. The experts who contributed to the programme gave the message that things are bad, very bad; but we still can sort many of the problems if only dickhead governments woke up to what people are asking; and what they want – IMPROVEMENTS.
This morning; the next morning, there are a couple of reviews by the UK national press which I copy below.
I do not know if the programme can be seen on Youtube, or if it will happen. UK citizens can re watch or first time watch the programme using the iplayer system which is only available in the UK.
Wherever you are in the world; this programme must be seen at some time. As I say it is simply called ‘Extinction’.
Here are the newspaper reviews from this morning – no doubt there will be more soon and I may add as extra posts as necessary.
Regards Mark
The ‘Guardian’ – an excellent newspaper which covers masses of environmental issues:
Extinction: The Facts review – a heartbreaking warning from David Attenborough
With an eighth of the planet’s species at risk of dying out, this documentary offered a stark look at the devastation that humans have wreaked, and are wreaking, on the natural world.
It is hard to absolutely, positively look forward to an hour-long programme about the many varied, catastrophic ways we have ruined the world around us. David Attenborough’s Extinction: The Facts (BBC One) was as upsetting as you might expect. If his earlier Planet Earth series delivered joyous portraits of nature at its most spectacular, here we had beautifully shot footage of monkeys desperately leaping into a river to escape a forest fire, a baby bear looking lost in a ransacked, smoking landscape, and the corpses of killer whales, tangled in fishing nets, rotting on the shore.
It was unbearably painful to watch.
People who make programmes about the environment are constantly searching for new ways to force us to pay attention, to make sure we resist the temptation to change channel in search of less distressing content. This time they tried making the theme of extinction feel urgent by filtering it through the prism of the coronavirus pandemic. But there is something depressing about this need to persuade people to focus on the imminent extinction of 1m different species by appealing to our self-interest, highlighting how humans will ultimately suffer as a result of the devastation we have brought upon ourselves.
“This year, we have been shown we have gone one step too far. Scientists have linked out destructive relationship with nature to the emergence of Covid-19,” a mournful Attenborough said. It’s sad that both the scientists and the film-makers sense the problem of extinction has to be shown to hurt us (in the form of triggering global pandemics that cut a swathe through humanity) before we really care enough to engage.
Because, actually, once you had steeled yourself to absorb the stream of images of the tragedy unfolding around us, this was an immensely powerful film on its own terms, and not simply in the context of the extra disruption that Covid-19 has caused over the past six months.
Attenborough’s regretful delivery of the facts only made them worse to hear. There were a few flashes of a youthful, more carefree version of him, laughing as he filmed endangered mountain gorillas in Rwanda in the 70s, but his tone has become stricken, acknowledging the failures of his and current generations to tackle the challenge.
He was joined by a chorus of aghast scientists, offering a bald summary of the accelerating state of decline. One million species out of 8m on earth are now threatened with extinction, they reminded us. Since 1970, vertebrate populations – birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles – have declined by 60%. While extinction is a natural process, it is the current rapid rate that is the problem. Studies suggest that extinction is now happening hundreds of times faster than the natural evolutionary rate and it is accelerating.
As you would expect from an Attenborough film, we learned much about some of the world’s most extraordinary animals, but touching footage of the giant anteater (who carries its pup lovingly draped over its back) was there only to illustrate the rapidly dwindling area of its remaining habitat in Brazil. Endearing shots of the nocturnal pangolin, which can consume 70m ants a year, was included only because it has become the most trafficked animal in the world, as a result of specious claims about the medicinal properties of its scales.
All this was set against the unforgiving soundtrack of a whirring electric chainsaw, cutting into the thick trunks of ancient trees, and the crunching of industrial machinery crashing through the forests.
The only polar bears and tigers that featured were the decapitated hunting trophies stored in customs warehouses, next to grinning crocodile heads and confiscated snakeskin boots.
There is a formula that makers of this documentary genre struggle to get right. They need the correct balance between displaying current levels of devastation and instilling a sense of urgency, while simultaneously offering an optimistic promise that it still isn’t quite too late for things to change. Contemplating his own mortality, Attenborough did his best. “I do truly believe that, together, we can make a better future. I might not be here to see it, but if we make the right decisions at this critical moment, we can safeguard our planet’s ecosystem.”
He showed how careful work by Rwandan conservationists has ensured that the mountain gorillas he filmed in the 70s have survived.
But this offered only a faint glimmer of hope. Images of the planet’s last two remaining white rhinos were the starkest illustration of how badly things have gone wrong.
“We betrayed them,” the Kenyan conservationist James Mwenda said.
A heartbreaking hour, but essential television.
The ‘Independent’ is non politically biased; and again reports on some outstanding environmental and natural issues:
The BBC documentary points out that there is no earthly reason why a new virus won’t one day wipe out the very species that has been trying to kill the planet for the past few centuries – us lot
You might have thought a pandemic that has taken half a million lives, inflicted pain and suffering on many millions more, and cost us trillions would make us think twice about the way we humans interact with nature. It seems not. The poor old pangolin and blameless bats are still being flogged and slaughtered in various so-called wet markets, even though it is widely believed that the coronavirus emerged through the close proximity of humans to these usually harmless wild animals.
As Extinction: The Facts makes clear, however, many deadly viruses – Sars, Ebola, Aids – have infected us via still-thriving wildlife markets and the intrusion of humans into natural habitats to rear cattle or grow soya (for animal feed) or produce palm oil (for processed food and fuel); places we don’t really belong. So, as the impressive collection of environmental talking heads assembled for this latest message from Sir David Attenborough depressingly points out, even when the climate crisis and mass extinctions are a clear and present danger, and coronavirus is taking our loved ones, humanity is still incapable of changing its voracious ways.
The documentary points out that there is no earthly reason why some new virus will not one day appear that is even more infectious and deadly than this coronavirus, and could wipe out the very species that has been trying to kill the planet for the past few centuries – us lot.
You could call it a revenge attack.
Still, it’s always nice to see nature’s survivors on film, and Attenborough is certainly one of them. If it’s possible to be a youthful 94-year-old, then that is what he is, his passion undimmed. He made his earliest TV appearance back in 1954, chasing giant anteaters around scrublands. These days, his knees probably aren’t up to that sort of lark, so his contributions are limited to impassioned pieces to camera, linking the archive footage of cute creatures, breathtaking panoramas and the controlled explosions of anger from thoughtful environmentalists. He also wouldn’t find it so easy to run around with anteaters now because there are fewer about; they too are losing out to land needed for cattle, to feed humans’ insatiable taste for a juicy burger.
Indeed, much of the show is basically a parade of animals that are on their way out – the last killer whale pod around Scotland (rendered infertile by pollution), the last two northern white rhinos (poaching), and of course the beleaguered pangolin (bogus “medicinal” usages for its scales, which are just keratin, the same as your fingernails).
Attenborough and his peers try to offer a little hope with the enviro-doom, because otherwise you’d just wipe away a tear, shrug and help yourself to another Big Mac, seeing as there is sod all anyone’s going to do about anything. Or you could join Extinction Rebellion and glue yourself to a train.
Thus it was genuinely moving to learn that the mountain gorillas Attenborough famously befriended four decades ago, then on the brink of extinction, have actually staged a recovery. That intimate encounter from his landmark series Life on Earth (1979) has lost none of its power, and seeing Sir David so young adds some poignancy. Now, an enlightened scheme taking money from tourists and, basically, using it to pay the local community to protect them, has seen the great apes population rise to more sustainable levels.
The wider message is that the planet too can be saved, if only we ease up on our consumption and waste.
Covid, said one expert, is a “moment” when we can reconsider how we live our lives. That’s true, but the inconvenient fact is that we all know we won’t, and we too are on our way to extinction.
below: Germany
Serbian Animals Voice (SAV) 