Posted on October 11, 2020 by Serbian Animals Voice (SAV)
Tomorrow, on the second Monday in October is #Thanksgiving in # Canada.
Benjamin Franklin wrote that in comparison to the bald eagle, the turkey is “a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America…He is besides, though a little vain and silly, a “Bird of Courage.”
Turkeys are intelligent and sensitive animals that are highly social. They create lasting social bonds with each other and are very affectionate; rather similar to dogs.
Turkeys are native North Americans.
European immigrants killed the abundant numbers of wild turkey written about in early historical accounts declined with colonization until they were nearly wiped out.
To this day we continue to massacre turkeys by the millions in the name of “Thanksgiving”.
Last year, 20 million turkeys were killed in Canada for their flesh that we don’t need.
Most of them were condemned to shortened lives of misery in crowded and filthy warehouses.
Give thanks to turkeys and all beings this Thanksgiving by taking them off your plate.
Animal Save Movement Canada
And I mean…What does a Thanksgiving symbolize?
Gratitude.
If this is connected with the mass murder of animals, then we remember archaic, prehistoric rituals when people wanted to thank their gods and sacrificed animals for it.
Since then, we mean that we have developed.
Therefore, such a “thank you” has nothing to do with gratitude or social culture.
It is a mass murder in the name of an outdated tradition and therefore perpetuates primitive man’s culture.
Canadians: Take a nice walk in nature that day, or play football and let the corpses of the animals out of your plate!
Your health would thank you for it, your conscience, and above all the animals.
Posted on October 11, 2020 by Serbian Animals Voice (SAV)
The law requires animals in the EU to be effectively stunned before slaughter. However, exceptions are made which permit some religious communities to slaughter without pre-stunning. This applies to slaughter by the Jewish method (Shechita) or by the Muslim method (Halal).
Compassion believes there should be no exemptions, and the law should be changed to require all animals to be effectively stunned before slaughter, regardless of the slaughter method that is then used (this also applies to mis-stunning in conventional abattoirs). We also believe that all slaughterhouses should have CCTV installed in order to assist with the monitoring of slaughter and to help prevent cruelty.
Loop-holes, poor enforcement, and a lack of suitable legislations can all impact the welfare of animals at the time of slaughter. There are a range of serious welfare concerns currently affecting vast numbers of animals across Europe.
Derogations to EU law allow animals to be slaughtered without pre-stunning for consumption by the Jewish and Muslim community. Slaughter without effective pre-stunning causes unacceptable suffering.
In the EU around 1 billion chickens a year are ineffectively stunned prior to slaughter. They experience an agonising electric shock that fails to properly stun them followed by the full pain and fear of being slaughtered while fully conscious.
It is becoming increasingly common across Europe to use high concentrations of CO2 gas to make pigs unconscious prior to slaughter. CO2 gas results in a burning and then drowning-like sensation and can cause around 15-30 seconds of very severe suffering prior to the pigs losing consciousness.
Every year over 2 million animals are exported live out of the EU. They are sent to countries where they receive no legal protection at the time of slaughter. Many face agonising, drawn out slaughter.
Roughly 1 billion fish are farmed and slaughtered in the EU each year. Most are slaughtered in ways that are inhumane and illegal. EU law requires fish to be spared avoidable suffering at slaughter. The technology exists to make fish unconscious prior to slaughter, but instead the vast majority are left to suffocate or killed while fully conscious in ways that cause immense suffering.
It has become apparent that huge numbers of animals in the EU – roughly 18% of all sheep, and 27% of all goats – are not killed in official slaughter houses. This means that their slaughter goes entirely unregulated, and much of this is likely to be inhumane.
Nine out of 10 EU citizens oppose animal slaughter without stunning, poll finds
Survey comes as ‘ritual slaughter’ legal case moves through European courts and Polish government proposes restrictions
Nine out of 10 EU citizens want their governments to ban the slaughter of animals that have not been stunned, according to a poll published today.
The results of the survey, carried out for the animal welfare campaign group Eurogroup for Animals, will feed into a cross-Europe debate about so-called “ritual slaughter” – the killing of animals in line with rules of religions such as Judaism and Islam for kosher and halal meat, respectively.
Some countries, including Slovenia, Finland, Denmark and Sweden, as well as the Belgian regions of Flanders and Wallonia, have already adopted stricter rules, with no exceptions to the mandatory stunning of animals before slaughter.
In Poland, the rightwing coalition government led by the Law and Justice (PiS) party has proposed limiting the practice to the needs of religious communities within the country. That would put an end to Poland’s large halal and kosher meat exports industry.
A legal case over the compatibility of the Flemish ban on slaughtering without stunning with EU law is proceeding through the European courts. An opinion published in September by the advocate general Gerard Hogan of the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) rejects the ability of member states to prohibit slaughter without stunning and implement reversible stunning (which disrupts brain function for a short time). The CJEU’s final decision is due at the end of this year.
In the poll, carried out by UK-based Savanta ComRes, 89% of 23,000 EU citizens surveyed said it should be mandatory to make animals unconscious before they are slaughtered. About as many, 88%, said that animals should be made unconscious before being slaughtered even for religious practices. And 90% of respondents believed that EU countries should retain the right to introduce stricter measures to better protect animals during slaughter.
“EU citizens want animals to be properly stunned before being slaughtered and clearly want member states to be able to introduce stricter legislative measures to protect animal welfare,” said Reineke Hameleers, chief executive of Eurogroup for Animals.
New Zealand banned slaughter without stunning in 2010 and made reversible stunning mandatory. Reversible stunning, or electronarcosis, is a way of stunning animals via electric shock that makes them unconscious for a short period of time, regaining consciousness if they are not slaughtered. The meat produced is certified as halal by religious communities within New Zealand, and recognised as such by communities in Malaysia, India, the Middle East, Canada and China.
Some religious groups have voiced concerns about the proposed changes in law in Europe. Mufti Tomasz Miśkiewicz, head of the Muslim Religious Union in Poland, said: “Halal isn’t just about food, it’s also about religion. The main problem with the proposed bill is that it effectively curbs Polish Muslims’ religious freedoms. The bill proposes that ritual slaughter will be allowed if it serves the community only. But how are you going to know exactly what the needs of the community are at any given time? That’s not anything veterinary inspectorates will know.”
“The law should protect and care for everyone regardless of their nationality or religion. Democracy is about protecting one’s rights.”
Jonathan Ornstein of the Jewish Community Centre in Kraków, Poland, said that if export of kosher or halal meat was made impossible, producers might stop producing it because doing so would not make economic sense, as the economy of scale would be gone. “Without kosher meat sourced locally, we would need to buy imported meat, which would dramatically increase the cost.”
He is a vegetarian, but stressed the cultural importance of kosher meat for the Jewish community.
Posted on October 11, 2020 by Serbian Animals Voice (SAV)
A bone-on-a-chip device developed to tackle animal testing in medical research
8 October 2020
A bone-on-a-chip device, which grows human bone tissue in the laboratory, has been developed by engineers in hopes that it could reduce the need for tests on animals in medical research.
The researchers, led by the Department of Materials Science and Engineering of Sheffield University and the Insigneo Center for Solico Medicine, demonstrated how the bone-on-a-chip could be used to test new possible therapies for weakened or diseased bones through growing bone tissue – and published the information in the Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology.
Compared to existing experiments, which generally involve comprehensive in vivo evaluations involving animals, this new method has been developed in vitro, entirely in the laboratory, and eliminates the need to use animals in research.
The field of organ-on-a-chip’s goal is to create minuscule devices that contain tiny versions of organs, including liver, bone or lungs in the laboratory. The hope is that discovering ones that function in humans by testing experimental drugs on tiny copies of human organs rather than in animal models will have a higher success rate.
Posted on October 10, 2020 by Serbian Animals Voice (SAV)
Committee against Bird Murder e.V.
In search of the last bow trap: The province of Brescia in northern Italy is the last place in the world where bow traps are still used today.
The trap is used to catch robins; wrens rarely get into it.
It is particularly brutal – the animals’ legs are broken alive, fatally injured, they hang upside down in the fishing gear for hours until they finally die.
Since 1985 the committee against bird murder in the mountains of Brescia has been working against this cruel “tradition” – in some years (e.g. 2001) we collected over 10,000 bow traps.
In 2012 it was less than 1,000 for the first time, last year only 224.
During the current bird protection camp in Brescia, we were unable to find a SINGLE bow trap within the first week of operation.
It is still too early to be happy about the extinction of the bow traps (our mission will run until November), but it won’t be long before we really find the last one!
Committee against Bird Murder e.V.
And I mean…it is really hard to believe and yet a reality – that traditions like this still take place in the middle of Europe in the 21st century!
Where animals are painfully killed, traditions are forbidden.
There is nothing to discuss either.
A supposedly progressive society must also manage to apply its concept of ethics to animals.
This is a huge omission and affects all animal welfare.
A trapped little bird, helplessly at the mercy of “tradition”, is one of the most primitive things a human can do.
As a politician, I would never allow the cultural tradition of my country to be in the hands of animal abusers.
Posted on October 10, 2020 by Serbian Animals Voice (SAV)
Agriculture Minister of Lower SaxonyBarbara Otte-Kinast tearfully informed the Lower Saxony state parliament about the catastrophic situation of pig farmers:
“I get phone calls from crying women and men on the farms who no longer know what to do. They say : I’ll kill my pigs and I’ll kill myself. “ (!!!)
The politician even had to briefly interrupt her speech.
“From many personal conversations I know that animal keepers in Lower Saxony are very desperate,” reports the Minister in an extremely emotional speech to the state parliament.
“I get phone calls from crying women and men from the courtyards who no longer know what to do.”
Overall, there could be a lack of slaughtering capacity for 120,000 pigs a week.
Emergency slaughter threatens.
In order to be able to comply with pandemic plans, Lower Saxony now wants to introduce flexible working hours for companies.
According to the Minister of Agriculture, consideration is also being given to slaughtering and dismantling on Sundays and public holidays.
5200 farms in Lower Saxony are already threatened by swine fever
The penetration of African swine fever into Germany is a major economic concern for pig farmers in Lower Saxony.
The Association of Producer of Cattle and Meat set the producer price for pork anew and lowered it from 1.47 euros by 20 cents to 1.27 euros per kilogram.
In the case of a fattening pig, the loss in value is around 20 euros.
Export stops for pork to non-EU countries, especially to China and Japan, are the catastrophic consequences.
Nowhere in Germany is the pig industry bigger than in Lower Saxony. According to the Ministry of Agriculture in Hanover, there are 5200 farms with 8.3 million animals.
The German pig farmers’ association puts the turnover in Lower Saxony at around 3.5 billion euros in good years.
And I mean…Germany has lost its “disease-free” status.
And the farmers complain again, they now appear as victims, they even threaten that they will kill themselves.
Only when they actually do it will their sins be forgiven.
For the fact that they torture the pigs and treat them like objects until they die.
And for the brutal slaughter of the animals too, in this crime, they also share the blame.
It is not the death of the animals that is a problem for the farmers but that they do not benefit from it.
Pigs are killed very early for meat production even without an ASF outbreak.
In order to produce a large amount of cheap meat for China, most animals are kept in appalling conditions: in their excrement with open, inflamed wounds, we remember the brutal videos.
The farmers should also kill themselves for this.
What the farmers fail to mention is that most pigs suffering from these common (but illegal) conditions become weak and susceptible to any virus, one of which is the highly contagious ASF.
Hypocrites, slave keepers who make money from the suffering of animals, and the lobbying of corrupt politicians!!
They finally still have time to do something sensible.
Either kill themself or produce potatoes and corn instead of animal corpses.
Posted on October 9, 2020 by Serbian Animals Voice (SAV)
The next time you walk out with a puppy, a cosmetically designed breed, from a breeder, from a puppy mill, a pet store, another dog is being walked somewhere else, for the last time.
Street animals are not FROM the street. They are ON the street.
Stray animals were once family members. They were faithful, happy, thankful for giving them a home.
Brainless people, without moral education, without any responsibility for the fate of the weaker ones, have put them on the street.
Therefore there is endless misery ON the street.
Don’t make this misery greater, make no mistake, and never buy your friend from a breeder.
Visit the animal shelter in your area and there will be someone waiting for you to be your friend for life.
“saving a street dog will not change the world but, without a doubt, the world will change for him”
Posted on October 9, 2020 by Serbian Animals Voice (SAV)
BBC news sheds light on UK calves exported to the Middle East
8 October 2020
Animals International
Eurogroup for Animals’ member organisations, Animal Welfare Foundation (AWF) and Animals International, gathered footage this summer, which for the first time confirmed that UK calves exported to Spain, are often shipped to the Middle East for slaughter.
With segments on Radio 4’s Farming Today, BBC 2 News, and the BBC News Channel, the BBC has released evidence gathered over the summer by Eurogroup for Animals’ members Animals International and the AWF. Despite the UK’s claim of not exporting animals for slaughter purposes and the active campaign carried out by Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) to Ban Live Exports, the investigations carried out by Eurogroup for Animals’ members clearly show that it happens to UK animals to end up in Third Countries’ abattoirs.
Indeed, the footage shows that calves exported on long journeys from the UK (Northern Ireland) to Spain to be fattened for beef are often then exported on further journeys to the Middle East. “We found animals with UK earring tags being slaughtered in Lebanon as well as a UK bull at the harbour in Cartagena (ES) ready to be loaded on a vessel headed for Libya”, said Gerit Weidinger, EU-Coordinator Animals International that for many years has investigated the awful conditions of the EU animals in Third Countries’ abattoirs. The footage published by BBC shows animals being thrown onto the floor and being dragged or suspended by their limbs while still conscious.
The UK currently exports some animals for breeding. Unweaned male calves are considered by-products of the dairy industry and their transport is particularly problematic because of the extremely fragile conditions of these young animals and their needs. AWF has been working on this issue for many years and restlessly reported about the animal welfare issues behind this trade. Only in 2019, the UK exported around 17,000 calves to Spain, the majority from Northern Ireland. Once reached Spain these animals are typically fattened on farms before being slaughtered or re-exported. In June this year, AWF filmed a UK calf being moved outside of its pen and left to die. “The calf was suffering from a respiratory illness, which is common after long, stressful journeys with little food or milk replacement”.
To avoid animal suffering and avoid the law being circumvented, it is key to stop any EU and UK export to non-EU countries
Serbian Animals Voice (SAV) 