1st Tuesday of the month, 7.30pm meet for an 8pm start.
Next to Nowhere, Social Centre, adjacent to News from Nowhere, 96 Bold Street, Liverpool, L1 4HY.
(Press buzzer for Basement) Everyone welcome.
Free Food Giveaway Outside McDonalds
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Posted 01/09/2010
Activists got together one Friday evening to promote vegan food outside McDonalds in Liverpool. Free vegan sausage rolls, donuts and veggie burgers where given away to the public by the bucket load! All the food was highly complimented and the evening was a great success! There are many reasons to boycott McDonalds - one of the main reasons being that every year they are responsible for the slaughter of thousands of cows and chickens from cruel, windowless factory farms. The free food giveaways will continue!
The 16th October marks world Anti McDonalds Day. Watch this space for news of more veggie burger give aways.
I'm a chameleon ....get me out of here
Posted 01/09/2010
The handmade cosmetic company, Lush , has teamed up with APA to launch a nationwide campaign to counter the growing popularity of reptiles as pets. To highlight the growing interest in the reptile trade activists from Merseyside Animal Rights demo'd a local exotic pet shop. Leaflets were handed out to passers by and a meeting was held with the owner of the shop. Full information about the cruel reptile trade was given to the owner and we hope he will cease to be a part in the buying and selling of these poor creatures.
The main aim of Lush's campaign is to counter the sales pitch propagated by the reptile industry that reptiles are 'easy to keep'. Claims are regularly made that reptiles make less demanding pets than dogs but this is only true if reptiles are kept in conditions where they are forced to suffer. As they are pre-programmed for a life in the wild, reptiles do not adapt to artificial conditions and therefore trying to replicate their natural environment is virtually impossible. Many reptiles die because of inappropriate housing, inadequate diet and simply from the stress of living in an unnatural environment. Concerns about the growing exotic pet trade are shared by all major animal welfare groups, as well as the British Veterinary Association.
Unfortunately it is still legal in the UK to sell reptiles that have been captured from the wild in other countries. Collecting reptiles for the pet trade is now considered a major threat to wild populations around the world, disrupting ecosystems and driving species to extinction. The majority of wild-caught reptiles come from Africa, Asia, and South America. Last year, records show that six million reptiles were imported in to the EU and nearly 200,000 reptiles arrived in the UK from outside the EU - the majority of them wild-caught. The trade in captive-bred reptiles is also a major concern - many UK captive-breeding operations operate outside of the law, are unlicensed and uninspected.
Whether wild caught or bred in captivity, these animals should not be kept as pets! Boycott exotic pets shops and boycott the exotic pet trade!
For more info www.apa.org.uk
Animal Rights Gathering 2010
Posted 01/09/2010
Members of Merseyside Animal Rights attended the summer Animal Rights Gathering over the bank holiday, 27-30 August. The event took place in a beautiful rural setting of an animal sanctuary in Northampton. The workshops covered such topics as understanding the law, creative campaigning, recruitment, updates on current campaigns such as SHAC, Hunt Sabs, Sea Shepherd as well as a truffle-making workshop, meditation and climbing skills!
Accommodation was provided by your own tent and if you were lucky a very warm duvet. Catering provided by Veggies was as usual scrumptious (all vegan so no stress in asking the old familiar question ‘is this vegan?') for £5 a day you enjoyed three meals, fresh fruit and endless hot and cold drinks. A tuck shop catered for those chocolate and sugary pangs. As an alternative to Veggies ‘Something Fishy' was on site serving up such mouth-watering dishes as vegan fish, spam and sausages in batter with mushy peas and chips together with battered ‘Mars Bars' for those who truly wanted a special treat. A disco on Saturday night with some good tunes and amazing dancers, a camp fire each evening gazing up at the wonderful starry skies, a bar offering some alcoholic beverages and open mic offered a time to relax and enjoy each other's company.
If you have not attended an ARG before or if you want to meet up with other activists then this is an ideal event as you will learn new skills, meet up with old and new friends, keep yourself motivated and will have a great time.
Veggies: www.veggies.org.uk ARG: www.argathering.org.uk
National Vegetarian Week
This is the annual awareness-raising campaign promoting inspirational vegetarian food and the benefits of a meat-free lifestyle. Celebrated by the Vegetarian Society since 1992, the Week is now an established event that gets bigger and better every year. To celebrate Merseyside Animal Rights are inviting people to sample delicious vegetarian food at the Food from Nowhere Cafe on Saturday 29th May between 12.00 and 5.00pm. The cafe is situated at 96 Bold Street, Liverpool, L1 4HY. (Press buzzer for Basement)
Stop animal experiments in Liverpool Universities
Liverpool and John Moores Universities are both conducting cruel, barbaric and pointless experiments on animals, using a variety of species; including primates, dogs, cats, rodents, rabbits and farm animals. Experiments explore a variety of subjects, ranging from biology to sports sciences, however all animal research conducted is just as invalid and scientifically worthless , no matter which faculty is carrying it out. Animal experimentation is unreliable for an accurate scientific result, due to large physiological, biological and genetic differences in the make up between species. As a result, there have been countless cases of pharmaceutical products being taken off the market following being passed as safe on animal models during clinical trials. Vioxx is a wellknown example, which was tested on primates and rodents, yet went on to cause heart defects and deaths in patients.
We are actively encouraging both universities not to use animals for research but to use safer alternatives. In the meantime we will continue to demonstrate and raise awareness within both the student and local community about the experiments which are being conducted.
Please contact both universities in complaint about their conduction of animal experimentation:
University of Liverpool, Liverpool, L69 3BX
Tel: 0151 794 2000
Deputy Vice Chancellor -
Liverpool John Moores,
2 Rodney Street
Liverpool L3 5UX
Tel: 0151 231 2121
Dean of Faculty of Science -
For more information contact SAEAB –
Email:
saeab@hushmail.com – Tel: 07955 234194
Another reason not to vote Conservative
General Election 2010: David Cameron backs badger cull
The Conservative leader, David Cameron, has backed the culling of badgers to protect livestock.
Mr Cameron said he was prepared to support “targeted culling” of the animals to prevent them spreading bovine tuberculosis to cows and other farm animals.
He said a Conservative government would support a policy in England based on that already put in place by the Welsh Assembly.
Wales is embarking on the first badger cull in two decades in an attempt to control the spread of Bovine TB.
Farmers leaders have backed a cull in England but Labour rejected the move, saying it wants to experiment with vaccinating badgers against the disease.
The National Farmers Union says that more than 150,000 cattle have been slaughtered because of bovine TB during the past decade.
Mr Cameron told voters in Plymouth, Devon, that he was prepared to sanction the selective trapping and killing of badgers to combat the disease.
Close Highgate Farm Website
A new website www.closehighgatefarm.com has been developed to support the campaign to close the farm. Highgate Farm, Normanby by Spital, Market Rasen, Lincolnshire breeds rabbits and ferrets for vivisection. It is almost impossible to believe that in the year 2010, animals are still being bred for experiments in hellish laboratories. But thanks to places like Highgate Farm the vivisection industry continues to thrive.
In 2008, activists rescued 129 rabbits from Highgate; exposing them cramming rabbits in cold, bare metal cages, suspended above thick excrement and urine in windowless sheds. The only glimpse of sunlight these small defenseless creatures see, is when they are loaded into vans to be shipped off to UK laboratories.
Their cruel intentions exposed, the farm briefly refrained from supplying laboratories but after instruction from the police, the farm reluctantly resumed supplying rabbits to laboratories, cold-heartedly putting money before compassion.
New Vegan Store Opens in Hoylake
Honest to Goodness is a Grocery store with a difference. They care about the planet and its occupants. the businesss is run with the belief that we should limit our impact on the environment as much as we can. Their products are ethically sourced and many are organic.
You can find them at 33 Market Street, Hoylake, Wirral, CH47 2BG. 0151 632 6516
Free Tilly
Posted 06/03/10
The most recent death of yet another trainer at SeaWorld did not have to happen. Demand that SeaWorld free Tilly, the whale involved in the accident, before another unnecessary death occurs
In aquariums , dolphins and other sea animals routinely die prematurely of stress and other captivity-related causes, and SeaWorld has an abysmal record. But it's not just animals who are dying as a result of this industry: Human injuries and deaths are also common.
The most recent death of yet another trainer at SeaWorld did not have to happen , and this is not the first time a trainer has been seized, thrown against the walls of the tank, and held down to drown.
You can help the animals imprisoned by SeaWorld today. Please take a moment to write to the Blackstone Group—the company that owns Sea World —and ask that it immediately set in place a firm and rapid plan to release the animals to sanctuaries that can provide them with a more natural environment.
Please click here to send your message
Rosanna Davison leads the way in promoting a vegan lifestyle to help save the planet
Posted 06/03/10
Top model and former Miss Ireland and Miss World, Rosanna Davison has been appearing in a new Supreme Master Television ad campaign promoting a vegan lifestyle.
The ad campaign, which featured on TV3, buses and the Luas, is aimed at encouraging people to re-think their attitudes to the treatment of animals generally and to meat consumption in particular, with its detrimental effects on the world we live in.
‘A vegan diet is so much better for your health, for the environment generally and, as no animals are harmed, it's cruelty free' she explained.
‘Watching the effect meat production and meat consumption is having on the world around us in terms of cruelty, emissions and health issues, I was determined to totally cut out dairy, eggs and cheese and have a completely vegan diet. It's going well so far and I feel great. I've loads of energy and just feel so much more invigorated as a result” she continued.
Rosanna went on to say that she had no hesitation in endorsing the ad campaign saying: ‘There comes a stage when you cannot sit on the fence and continue living a life that will have serious consequences for future generations. I am happy to play my part, however small. If we're going to reverse the damage we've done to our health and the environment, we have to begin now' Rosanna said.
Supreme Master Television, which broadcasts on Sky Channel 835, is dedicated to promoting issues which will create a better world and reduce humanity's suffering where possible. Broadcasting globally to every continent on 14 satellite platforms, with shows in 40 different languages (with simultaneous multi-language subtitles in up to 26 languages), the station covers issues of importance on a global scale, from climate change to poverty, disaster relief to encouraging personal generosity. Non-commercial and run entirely by volunteers, Supreme Master Television encourages people to build ever wider global bridges of love, understanding, information and compassion on issues of mutual interest.
The station promotes a vegan diet as the fastest way to cool the planet, slow down global warming and influence climate change. The promoters wish to remind audiences that animal agriculture, a major source of water pollution and deforestation has become one of the biggest culprits in global warming. Furthermore as animal agriculture is a growing industry, this poses a real and present threat to the future of our planet.
They state that the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations recently released a report showing that farmed animals are a top contributor to today's serious environmental problems, including greenhouse gases. They point out that livestock create 36% of lethal methane gas globally and, through burning forest for pasture and growing soy feed for livestock, it is the largest contributor of lethal black carbon in Antarctica and possibly the Andes (methane and black carbon cause many times more warming than carbon dioxide).
As is evident in Copenhagen recently, many countries are saying we need to limit global average temperature increases to below 1.5 degrees centigrade. Supreme Master TV's assertion is that, by going vegan, we can influence this rate of change quite dramatically.
As we have seen in Ireland over the last number of years, storms are becoming more severe, while temperatures are rising around the world, with several deaths as a result. Ice caps are melting and our environment is changing rapidly with this climate change.
We're getting more and more ‘green' conscious - recycling goods, buying energy-saving light bulbs and fuel-efficient hybrid cars. But most people are neglecting one of the most important steps toward stopping global warming: adopting a vegetarian diet.
What we eat has a huge impact on the environment—and changing our diet can make a difference. Almost 70 percent of all agricultural land worldwide is given over to livestock production, while 33 percent of the Earth's arable land surface is used for growing crops to feed to animals. And that number is expected to increase with the global livestock sector growing faster than any other agricultural subsector. That's because in almost every region of the world, consumption of animal products is on the rise and this has serious implications for the rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and other diet-related illnesses in humans.
Research has shown that eliminating or reducing meat and other animal products can have very positive effects on health. Participants can expect to experience improvements in their weight, blood pressure and cholesterol levels after making healthy dietary changes, and they are encouraged to stick with the new vegan diet because, it is expected, they will enjoy the foods and generally feel better than previously.
Studies have shown that people who follow a plant-based diet are slimmer and have less risk of chronic, diet-related diseases than people on high-fat, meat-based diets. In fact, Ireland could begin to reverse its diabetes and obesity rates by turning to a high-fibre, low-fat vegetarian diet consisting primarily of vegetables and fruits, whole grains, and beans, lentils and peas. A meatless diet can also lead to lower cholesterol, lower blood pressure and increased energy in most people.
Under the patronage of Supreme Master Ching Hai, a world-renowned humanitarian, respected spiritual teacher and accomplished artist, Supreme Master Television features programs that support a modern lifestyle that is green, healthy and compassionate. From its live broadcasts of peace-building events, to interviews with presidents, celebrities and the extraordinary peace wishes of ordinary people, to its on-going humanitarian relief activities, the station and its volunteers have reached out to millions of people worldwide, making a worthwhile contribution to people's lives.
Exposed: Dark seret of the farm where tigers' bodies are plundered to make £185 wine
Posted 28/02/10
Behind rusted bars, a skeletal male tiger lies panting on the filthy concrete floor of his cage, covered in sores and untreated wounds. His once-fearsome body is so emaciated it is little more than a pitiful pile of fur and bones.
Death is surely a matter of days away and can only come as a welcome release. Wardens at the wildlife park in southwest China say, indifferently, that they do not expect him to see the start of the Year of the Tiger which began last Sunday.
'What can we do?' a female park official asks a small huddle of visitors with a sigh and a casual shrug. 'He's dying, of course, but we have to keep feeding him until he does. It's against the law to kill tigers.'
Instead, it seems, they die slowly of neglect. In row after row of foul, cramped cages, more tigers lie alone, crippled and dying. One is hunched up against the side of its cage with its neck grotesquely deformed. Another, blinded in one eye, lies motionless.
This shabby, rundown park in Guilin - one of China's main tourist cities - is home to the world's biggest single collection of tigers. Yet it is never included on foreigners' tour itineraries.
For here, 1,500 captive tigers - around half as many as there are thought to be remaining in the wild - live out miserable lives in squalid conditions.
Each tiger costs around £6 a day to feed, and it is easy to see that the small clusters of visitors paying £7.50 each to wander around the cages and watch bizarre animal shows cannot possibly cover even the cost of food for the vast park.
The reason is the tigers, mostly Siberian, are far more valuable dead than alive.
For a 55lb pile of bones from a single tiger can be worth up to £225,000. There is a hugely lucrative trade in the skeletons at the Guilin park.
Dead tigers are driven 200 miles from the park, officially called the Xiongshen Tiger and Bear Mountain Village, to a huge subterranean complex where their fur is stripped from their carcasses and their bones collected to make tiger wine that can sell for £185 a bottle.
So for the park, where the tigers are bred for their bones, every year is the Year of the Tiger, and conservationists fear that the vile trade could be helping push some species of wild big cat into extinction.
On paper, China has signed international wildlife treaties that ban all trade in tiger body parts and claims to have outlawed the industry.
In reality, Xiongshen and other parks like it operate in a grey area of the law, using the bones of animals that have died naturally in captivity to produce 'medicinal' wine, apparently with the government's blessing.
Tigers have been used in Chinese traditional medicine for centuries. Their eyeballs are used to treat epilepsy, their bile to stop convulsions, their whiskers to sooth toothache and their penises as a potent sexual tonic.
The most valuable parts, however, are the bones, which are used to make wine that is said to cure rheumatism and arthritis, and prolong life.
Despite its rapid modernisation, the use of traditional medicine in China has increased rather than declined because more people can afford exotic treatments.
Tiger bone wine, made by steeping tiger bones in huge vats of potent 38 per cent-proof rice wine, has for more than 2,000 years been one of the most expensive and sought-after Chinese traditional medicines, believed to bestow the tiger's power and strength upon the taker.
It is popular among wealthy middle-aged men including, reportedly, some of the Communist Party's senior officials and is said to have been used by modern China's founder Chairman Mao Tse-Tung himself, in the superstitious belief that it counters the effects of ageing and boosts flagging sex drive.
Because of the scarcity of tigers, a single bottle of tiger bone wine from a rare vintage year can sell for £600 or more. As well as a supposed medical remedy, it is a prestigious drink sometimes shared between men at high-level political or business meetings, or drunk at lavish parties.
The lucrative trade has accelerated the disappearance of all but a handful of China ' s remaining wild tigers as peasants turn poachers to track down the animals, knowing just one will make them more money than a farmer can earn in a decade.
Millionaire Zhou Weisen, who is 47 and was born in the Year of the Tiger himself, realised at an early age he could make his fortune by keeping tigers in wretched captivity. He opened the Guilin park with 60 tigers in 1993, breeding them intensively so their numbers boomed to today's population of 1,500.
The park has the atmosphere of a medieval circus, with animals treated in a way that would cause outrage in any western country.
Twice a day, a few relatively tame tigers are put on leashes and led out to amuse small groups of visitors.
For the equivalent of £1.80 a time, parents and their children get the opportunity to feed strips of beef to a scrawny, undernourished young tiger in the care of a park keeper who, with no sense of irony, tells them the tiger is a 'symbol of power in the animal kingdom'.
Then a ramshackle carnival float decorated with pictures of tigers is led out with a collection of big cats cowering on its deck where they are forced by park keepers to stand up on their hind legs, and beaten with wooden stakes if they do not obey.
Parents clap and shriek with laughter while children look on with bemused grins as the daily ritual is performed.
A closer look reveals that one of the performing tigers has a tumour on his left leg the size of a football. Other tigers have untreated wounds and scars from thrashings or fights with other tigers.
Only a few hundred of the park's animals are on view to visitors. The majority are hidden from sight in row after row of cages outside the public area of the park. Here, bored tigers crammed four or more to a cage, pace restlessly back and forth.
Others are kept locked in small, concrete enclosures, spending their days in perpetual darkness. They occasionally jump up on their hind legs to peer through narrow, slit windows, to get a rare glimpse of daylight.
Welfare expert David Neale from Animals Asia, said after inspecting the park: 'These animals are kept in appalling conditions and it is clear that many are suffering from malnutrition. And if what the public can see is so appalling, can you imagine what the conditions are like for the tigers hidden from view?'
Ironically, the park is littered with billboards proclaiming the owners' desire to protect wildlife. At the end of their tour of the park, visitors are directed to a 'science hall' where a complete tiger skeleton is displayed in a Perspex case.
This building is decorated with pictures showing a cave lined with earthenware jars.
'Each jar contains 500kg of rice wine with a complete set of tiger bones,' saleswoman Miss Li tells us with a practised patter.
'The wine is brewed in mountain caves a few hundred kilometres away where the water is ideal. Top [Communist Party] officials like to drink this wine. We serve it to them whenever they visit.'
Cutting hurriedly to the chase before the next group of guests finish their tour of the park and enter the science hall, she then offers the tiger wine in three, six and nine-year vintages at £60, £92 and £185 a bottle.
Miss Li assures us that if we buy here, our tiger wine comes with a cast-iron guarantee of quality.
'We have more than 1,500 tigers,' she says. 'There is no lack of raw materials for us. There are a few hundred dead tigers lying in our freezers. I can promise you that we sell only authentic tiger products.
'You know, of course, that the tiger is a protected animal but the government does allow us to trade tigers that have died naturally, as a way of helping us financially.'
Asked whether they all died natural deaths, she replied vaguely: 'Many of them die from illness or in fights with other tigers.'
Park owner Mr Zhou is also the owner of the secretive, subterranean factory 200 miles from Guilin where the bones and tiger bodies are processed in vast cellars storing up to 8,000 tons of tiger bone wine. The factory sells around 200,000 bottles a year and keeps up to 600 tiger skeletons at a time in huge vats.
The underground caverns, where witnesses have reported seeing entire tigers in 5ft high vats, are strictly off limits to visitors. But an assistant in the factory shop was keen to tell us about the scale of the operation.
'Our peak time is now, just before the Chinese New Year,' she said. 'We have so many orders and we simply haven't got enough boxes to complete the packaging, or workers to process the orders.'
The factory has a huge network of salespeople across China, she said, and charges steep distribution fees for anyone who wants to enjoy a slice of the business in tiger wine.
Factory sales manager Miss Wang told our interpreter over the phone: 'If you want to be a distributor, the licence will cost you 150,000 yuan (£14,000) a year for a provincial capital-and 80,000 yuan (£7,500) for a smaller city. A provincial sole distributor licence costs five million yuan (£468,000) a year.'
The factory's products are showcased in a sales office in the nearby town of Pingnan, where a variety of bottles of tiger bone wine are on show for potential buyers. But even here, deep in the Chinese countryside, the trade in tigers is a secret guarded with paranoid intensity.
As I took pictures of the outside of the sales office, I was approached by two security guards who demanded to look at my camera and insisted I deleted any pictures of the building.
They held me for 20 minutes and made frantic phone calls before letting me go once they were satisfied my camera's memory was empty.
Hundreds of miles south in Shenzhen, on the border with Hong Kong, the city's licensed distributor - who gets his tiger bone wine from the Guilin park - runs his business from the ground floor shop of a private apartment complex.
Lu Xi Ning, who is in his early 40s, has known Zhou Weisen of the Guilin tiger farm for more than ten years.
Visitors to his wine shop are allowed in by appointment only. 'It's a sensitive business,' he tells me in a room containing bottles of tiger bone wine of different vintages.
'My business has been improving in the last three years. But I cannot advertise,' he says as he pours tea. 'It is reliant on regulars and recommendations. Customers come back again and again though. More people want our products because of the Year of the Tiger.'
Praising its health benefits, Lu said: 'I have been drinking it every day for the past three years. I recommend one or two Chinese teacups each day. It is good for your circulation.' He added with a knowing wink: 'It is particularly good for men.'
Taking us to one side, he said quietly: 'If you travel by plane, you'd better take the wine out of the tiger bottle and put it into a red wine bottle or a Pepsi bottle, just to be on the safe side. Then it should be fine.'
Jill Robinson, director of Animals Asia, has little doubt that the park has similar networks of sellers for other tiger parts, such as skins, teeth, eyeballs, whiskers and penises: all highly valued in Chinese traditional medicine.
Robinson, who visited the park last year, described it as being nothing more than a thinly disguised tiger farm.
'You can see that their remit is to keep the animals barely alive,' she said. 'They keep breeding and do not properly report births or deaths so they can use the bodies.'
It is a trade that Steve Broad, executive director of the international wildlife watchdog group TRAFFIC, described as 'a disaster' not only for China but the world's remaining wild tigers.
'It is inevitable that wild tiger products will get drawn into a market created by farmed tiger parts,' he said. 'These business people are creating a market that could be catastrophic for the wild tiger population.
'We are not talking about a medicine trade but a trade where the tiger tonic is seen as a pick-me-up and the people who use it are doing it for bravado. The rarer the animal the better. It is nurturing the worst possible market among the rich and naive.'
Another body fighting to halt the trade in tiger bones is the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA). Spokeswoman Debbie Banks said: 'Tiger bone wine is not about tradition. It is about commerce. If China is truly committed, they will make a ban on all trade in tiger products happen. They need to stop farming and breeding tigers.
'The farmers are thinking of all possible loopholes to exploit. They even argue that because tiger bone is in the vat and not actually in the bottle, then it is legal to sell. They also argue that it is a tonic rather than a medicine and therefore not covered by the law.'
Wildly misleading: The image on an advert for the tiger 'park' at Guilin has no relation to the reality
Appeals by the EIA to the Chinese government have so far fallen on deaf ears. 'The State Forestry Administration said it would cost millions to phase out the farms, and that we are interfering in sovereign issues,' Ms Banks said.
Traditional beliefs are, it seems, tough to shift. The Guilin park, whose owner boasts of how he has served tiger wine to some of China's top leaders, has been given a £700,000 government grant to build new cages for its 'scientific research'.
We saw some of those new cages being put to use during our visit, housing up to ten animals each as the park's breeding programme continues apace.
China's government has stubbornly resisted attempts to stop the illicit trade in tiger parts. Despite grudgingly introducing legislation banning the use of tiger bones in medicine, China argued at an international convention in 2007 that the ban on trading tiger parts had 'seriously impacted not only Chinese traditional culture but also the medicinal treatment and health care of the Chinese people'.
Tigers, the Chinese government argued to the astonishment of delegates from other countries, should be treated like crocodiles and farmed for their bones and skin.
Perhaps fittingly, China itself is likely to be one of the first countries to feel the effect of the trade in tiger parts. One week into the Year of the Tiger, its own tiger population is on the brink of extinction.
History has been cruel to the big cat in China. Aside from the threat of hunting, there has been urbanisation, and the bizarre 1959 decision by Chairman Mao to declare the tiger 'an enemy of the people'.
Half a century later, as the trade in tiger bones puts a huge price on the head of the remaining few wild Chinese tigers, Ms Robinson and other conservationists believe the fate of the tiger in China is sealed.
'By the next Year of the Tiger [2022] China will not have any wild tigers left,' she said. 'I wonder how proud the people involved in this trade will be when they have to explain to their children what happened to the wild tigers.'
We were unable to contact Zhou Weisen at the time of going to press, but an employee at the Xiongshen Tiger And Bear Mountain Village confirmed on the phone that the park sold tiger wine, made from the bones of 'eliminated tigers'.
Questioned further about the process, he said: 'We are only selling the tiger bone wine, I am not sure about the specifics.'
Jonathan Safran Foer: The truth about factory farming
Posted 28/02/10
In this disturbing extract from Eating Animals, the novelist reveals the unpalatable truth about factory-farmed poultry
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Everyone has a mental image of a farm, and to most it probably includes fields, barns, tractors and animals, or at least one of the above. I doubt there's anyone on earth not involved in farming whose mind would conjure what I'm now looking at. And yet before me is the kind of farm that produces roughly 99% of the animals consumed in America.
This Californian turkey farm is surrounded by barbed-wire fencing and set up in a series of seven sheds, each about 50ft wide by 500ft long, each holding in the neighborhood of 25,000 birds. Adjacent to the sheds is a massive granary, which looks more like something out of Blade Runner than Little House on the Prairie. Metal pipes spiderweb the outsides of the buildings, massive fans protrude and clang, and floodlights project weirdly discrete pockets of day.
I am accompanied tonight by an animal activist, "C". She is short and wispy. She wears aviator glasses, flip-flops and braces.
With her astronaut's gloves, C spreads the harp of barbed wire far enough apart for me to squeeze through. My trousers snag and rip, but they are disposable, purchased for this occasion.
The surface is lunarlike. With each step, my feet sink into a compost of animal waste, dirt, and I-don't-yet-know-what-else that has been poured around the sheds. I have to curl my toes to keep my shoes from being left behind in the glutinous muck. We approach the first shed. Light spills from under its door. I wonder: Why would a shed full of animals be brightly lit in the middle of the night?
I can hear movement from inside: the hum of machines blends with what sounds a bit like a whispering audience or a chandelier shop in a mild earthquake. C wrestles with the door and then signals that we should move to the next shed.
We spend several minutes like this, looking for an unlocked door. Another why: Why would a farmer lock the doors of his turkey farm?
It can't be because he's afraid someone will steal his equipment or animals. There's no equipment to steal, and the animals aren't worth the herculean effort it would take to illicitly transport a significant number. A farmer doesn't lock his doors because he's afraid his animals will escape. Turkeys can't turn doorknobs. It isn't because of biosecurity, either. Barbed wire is enough to keep out the merely curious. So why? In the three years I will spend immersed in animal agriculture, nothing will unsettle me more than the locked doors.
As it turns out, locked doors are the least of it. I never heard back from any of the companies I wrote to. Even research organisations with paid staff find themselves consistently thwarted by industry secrecy.
The power brokers of factory farming know that their business model depends on consumers not being able to see (or hear about) what they do.
This is a farm
It's hard to get one's head around the magnitude of 25,000 or 30,000 birds in one room. You don't have to see it for yourself to understand that things are packed pretty tight. In its Animal Welfare Guidelines, the US National Chicken Council indicates an appropriate stocking density to be eight-tenths of a square foot per bird. Try to picture it. Find a piece of printer paper and imagine a full-grown bird shaped something like a football with legs standing on it. Imagine 25,000 of these rectangles in a grid. Now enclose the grid with windowless walls and put a ceiling on top. Run in automated (drug-laced) feed, water, heating, and ventilation systems. This is a farm.
Now to the farming. First, find a chicken that will grow big fast on as little feed as possible. The muscles and fat tissues of the newly engineered broiler birds – chickens that become meat, as opposed to layers, chickens that lay eggs – grow significantly faster than their bones, leading to deformities and disease. Somewhere between 1% and 4% of the birds will die writhing in convulsions from sudden-death syndrome, a condition virtually unknown outside of factory farms. Three out of four will have some degree of walking impairment, and common sense suggests they are in chronic pain.
For broilers, leave the lights on about 24 hours a day for the first week or so of the chicks' lives. This encourages them to eat more. Then turn the lights off a bit, giving them maybe four hours of darkness a day – just enough sleep for them to survive. Of course, chickens will go crazy if forced to live in such grossly unnatural conditions for long. At least broiler birds are typically slaughtered on the 42nd day of their lives (or increasingly the 39th), so they haven't yet established social hierarchies to fight over.
Needless to say, jamming deformed, drugged, overstressed birds together in a filthy, waste-coated room is not very healthy. Eye damage, blindness, bacterial infections of bones, slipped vertebrae, paralysis, internal bleeding, anemia, slipped tendons, twisted lower legs and necks, respiratory diseases and weakened immune systems are frequent and long-standing problems on factory farms. Scientific studies and US government records suggest that virtually all chickens become infected with E coli (an indicator of faecal contamination) and between 39% and 75% of chickens in retail stores are still infected. Around 8% of birds become infected with salmonella. Seventy to 90% are infected with another potentially deadly pathogen, campylobacter.
How good could a drug-stuffed, disease-ridden, shit-contaminated animal possibly taste? In practice, the birds will be injected (or otherwise pumped up) with "broths" and salty solutions to give them what we have come to think of as the chicken look, smell and taste.
The farming done, it's now time for "processing". First, you'll need to find workers to gather the birds into crates and "hold the line" that will turn the living birds into plastic-wrapped parts. Illegal aliens are often preferred, but poor recent immigrants who do not speak English are also desirable employees. Pay your workers minimum wage, or near to it, to scoop up the birds – five in each hand – and jam them into transport crates.
If your operation is running at the proper speed – 105 chickens crated by a single worker in 3.5 minutes is the expected rate according to several catchers I interviewed – the workers will regularly feel the birds' bones snapping in their hands. (Approximately 30% of all live birds arriving at the slaughterhouse have freshly broken bones as a result of their Frankenstein genetics and rough treatment.)
Load the crates into trucks. Ignore weather extremes and don't feed or water the birds, even if the processing plant is hundreds of miles away. Upon arrival at the plant, have more workers sling the birds, upside down by their ankles in metal shackles, on to a moving conveyer system. More bones will be broken. Often the screaming of the birds and the flapping of their wings will be so loud that workers won't be able to hear the person next to them on the line. Often the birds will defecate in pain and terror.
The conveyer system drags the birds through an electrified water bath. This most likely paralyses them but doesn't render them insensible. Other countries, including the UK, require (legally, at least) that chickens be rendered unconscious or killed prior to bleeding and scalding. In America, the voltage is kept low – about one-tenth of the level necessary to render the animals unconscious. After it has travelled through the bath, a paralysed bird's eyes might still move. Sometimes the birds will have enough control of their bodies to slowly open their beaks, as though attempting to scream.
The next stop on the line will be an automated throat slitter. Blood will slowly drain out of the bird, unless the relevant arteries are missed, which happens, according to another worker I spoke with, "all the time". So you'll need a few more workers to function as backup slaughterers – "kill men" – who will slit the throats of the birds that the machine misses. Unless they, too, miss the birds, which I was also told happens "all the time". According to the National Chicken Council – representatives of the industry – about 180 million chickens are improperly slaughtered each year. When asked if these numbers troubled him, Richard L Lobb, the council's spokesman, sighed, "The process is over in a matter of minutes."
Faeces, and other 'blemishes'
I spoke to numerous catchers, live hangers, and kill men, who described birds going alive and conscious into the scalding tank, which helps open the bird's pores. Since faeces on skin and feathers end up in these tanks, the birds leave filled with pathogens that they have inhaled or absorbed through their skin.
After the birds' heads are pulled off and their feet removed, machines open them with a vertical incision and remove their guts. Contamination often occurs here, as the high-speed machines commonly rip open intestines, releasing faeces into the birds' body cavities. Once upon a time, US Department of Agriculture (Usda) inspectors had to condemn any bird with such faecal contamination. But about 30 years ago, the poultry industry convinced the Usda to reclassify faeces so that it could continue to use these automatic eviscerators. Once a dangerous contaminant, faeces are now classified as a "cosmetic blemish".
Perhaps Lobb and the National Chicken Council would simply sigh and say, "People are done consuming the faeces in a matter of minutes."
Next the birds are inspected by a Usda official, whose ostensible function is to keep the consumer safe. The inspector has approximately two seconds to examine each bird inside and out, for more than a dozen different diseases and suspect abnormalities. He or she looks at about 25,000 birds a day. Journalist Scott Bronstein conducted interviews with nearly 100 Usda poultry inspectors from 37 plants. "Every week," he reports, "millions of chickens leaking yellow pus, stained by green faeces, contaminated by harmful bacteria, or marred by lung and heart infections, cancerous tumours or skin conditions are shipped for sale to consumers."
Next, the chickens go to a massive refrigerated tank of water, where thousands of birds are communally cooled. The Government Accountability Project, a US whistleblower protection organisation, has said that the "water in these tanks has been aptly named 'faecal soup' for all the filth and bacteria floating around".
While a significant number of European and Canadian poultry processors employ air-chilling systems, 99% of US poultry producers have stayed with water-immersion systems and fought lawsuits from both consumers and the beef industry to continue their use.
Air-chilling reduces the weight of a bird's carcass, but water-chilling causes a dead bird to soak up water (the "faecal soup"). One study has shown that simply placing the chicken carcasses in sealed plastic bags during the chilling stage would eliminate cross-contamination. But that would also eliminate an opportunity to turn waste-water into tens of millions of dollars' worth of additional weight in poultry products.
What I've described is not exceptional. It isn't the result of masochistic workers, defective machinery, or "bad apples". It is the rule. More than 99% of all chickens sold for meat in America live and die like this. For each food species, animal agriculture is now dominated by the factory farm – 97% of laying hens, 99% of turkeys, 95% of pigs and 78% of cattle.
Today six billion chickens are raised in roughly these conditions each year in the EU, over nine billion in America, and more than seven billion in China. All told, there are 50 billion factory-farmed birds worldwide. Every year 50 billion birds are made to live and die like this.
An act of mercy
Back at the turkey farm, men's voices drift over from the granary. Why are they working at 3.30 in the morning? Machines engage. What kinds of machines? It's the middle of the night and things are happening. What is happening?
"Found one," C whispers, finding an unlocked door. She slides it open, releasing a parallelogram of light, and enters. The first thing that catches my attention is the row of gas masks on the near wall. Why would there be gas masks in a farm shed?
We creep in. There are tens of thousands of turkey chicks. Fist-sized, with feathers the colour of sawdust, they're nearly invisible on the sawdust floor. At first the situation doesn't look too bad. It's crowded, but they seem happy enough. The exhilaration of seeing what I came to see, and confronting all of these baby animals, has me feeling pretty good.
I tiptoe around and explore, leaving vague bootie prints in the sawdust. The closer I look, the more I see. The ends of the beaks of the chicks are blackened, as are the ends of their toes. Some have red spots on the tops of their heads.
Because there are so many animals, it takes me several minutes before I take in just how many dead ones there are. Some are blood-matted; some are covered in sores. Some seem to have been pecked at; others are as desiccated and loosely gathered as small piles of dead leaves. Some are deformed. The dead are the exceptions, but there are few places to look without seeing at least one.
One chick is trembling on its side, legs splayed, eyes crusted over. Scabs protrude from bald patches. Its beak is slightly open, and its head is shaking back and forth. How old is it? A week? Two? Has it been like this for all of its life, or did something happen to it? What could have happened to it?
C will know what to do, I think. She opens her bag and removes a knife. Holding one hand over the chick's head – is she keeping it still or covering its eyes? – she slices its neck, rescuing it.
The UK meat industry 'A remarkably similar story'
Anyone who cares about the issues raised by factory farming should not find any peace in being British. While my research has focused on American agriculture, a remarkably similar story could be told about animal farming in the UK.
There are some important differences: sow stalls (gestation crates) and veal creates are banned in the UK, whereas they are the norm in America; poultry slaughter is almost certainly less cruel. But there are far more, and more important, similarities.
Approximately 800 million chickens, turkeys and pigs are factory farmed in the UK every year – more than 10 animals for every human. (If this number were to include cows and fish – which are, for different reasons, difficult to quantify – it would be dramatically larger.) Approximately 95% of poultry and 60% of pigs are raised on factory farms. The techniques and outcomes are often identical to those in the US.
Back the hunting ban
Posted 07/02/2010
This is the 5th year since the Hunting Ban Bill was passed. But the Hunting Act is under threat as pro-hunt activists are preparing to spend thousands of pounds backing Tory MPs and candidates committed to bringing back the cruel sport. The Tory's animal welfare spokesperson in Parliament has made it clear that the Tories are elected at the General Election introducing legislation to bring back hunting with dogs would be a priority.
The Tory stance is in spite of overwhelming public support for the ban. A recent Ipsos Mori poll revealed three quarters of the population do not want hunting with dogs to be made legal again. The same poll showed that 72% of the rural population want to keep the ban.
Paul Blomfield said: “For David Cameron, getting the Act repealed is a top priority. He used to go hunting, until his PR advisers told him not to; he even talked about hunting in his first ever speech to Parliament; and he has said that if he becomes Prime Minister he will get rid of the hunting ban as soon as possible.
“But, like the vast majority of people in Sheffield who care about animal rights, I think that barbaric act of letting dogs tear foxes to pieces with their teeth shouldn't be allowed to return to our countryside. That's why I'm supporting www.backtheban.com and I'm urging everyone else who supports the ban to sign up to the ‘Back the Ban' campaign too.
Hilary Benn, Secretary of State at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said:
“If you think the Tories have changed, their views on fox hunting with dogs make it absolutely clear that their priorities haven't. They know the public doesn't agree with them on this, but they are determined to go ahead if they are given the chance. That's why we need to continue to campaign to stop this barbaric 'sport' from returning to our land and to join www.backtheban.com .”
It's that time again folks!
Posted 27/10/2009
MEAT-FREE Christmas treats are on the menu in Lark Lane this December at Liverpool's Christmas Vegan Food Fayre.
The free event at the Old Police Station promises samples of meat-free and dairy-free alternatives to everything on the Christmas table and people will be able to try out a meat free Christmas roast dinner. There will also be a raffle and a tombola
Visitors can also chat to vegan groups, share recipes and browse at stalls selling everything from beauty products to books and cakes, presented by organisations like Viva, Scouse Veg and News from Nowhere.
The Vegan Christmas Food Fayre starts at 12 noon.
National Anti-Fur March and Rally
Posted 30/09/2009
Last year over 400 activists took part in the National Anti-Fur March in London, the biggest anti-fur march for many years, see here for the report. Let's make this year's march bigger and even better.
Although the farming and trapping of animals of animals for their fur has now been outlawed in this country, it is still legal to import and sell fur which has been produced using these same horrific methods.
This year the march will once again take place around Knightsbridge in London, which continues to be a major centre of the fur trade. In this fashionable part of London, there are dozens of shops selling fur of all kinds. The march will take us past many of these shops such as Fendi, Gucci and Armani, as well as campaign targets such as Escada and Joseph, and not forgetting Harrods, the only department store in the UK which still sells fur.
London activists are out all year round campaigning against this trade, this march will be a chance for us to show our solidarity with them, and our determination to see this trade ended once and for all.
Please contact us by email if you need a lift and we hope to see you in London on October 17th.
Fur selling fashion company files for bankruptcy
Posted 30/08/2009
The German fashion company Escada AG has filed for bankruptcy after being unable to obtain sufficient financing.
The Munich-based company, infamous for selling fur was expected to make the filing this week after it failed to get the necessary support for an earlier bond swap.
Escada was once one of the biggest fashion brands in the world, but has seen its popularity, sales and earnings decline in recent years.
Animal rights activists have staged demonstrations across Europe and the United States against the selling of fur including activists from Manchester and Merseyside who regulary demonstrated at the Bramhall Escada shop in Cheshire.
Bolivia bans all circus animals
Posted 02/08/2009
Bolivia has enacted what animal rights activists are calling the world's first ban on all animals in circuses.
A handful of other countries have banned the use of wild animals in circuses, but the Bolivian ban includes domestic animals as well.
The law, which states that the use of animals in circuses "constitutes an act of cruelty", took effect on 1 July with operators given a year to comply, according to the bill's sponsor, Ximena Flores.
The law was proposed after an undercover investigation by the nonprofit-making London-based group Animal Defenders International (ADI) found widespread abuse in circuses operating in Bolivia.
Flores said authorities aim to stop circus operators from killing animals they can no longer use.
"About 50 animals are circulating in national and international circuses at the moment [in Bolivia] and we want to negotiate to make sure that the animals aren't eliminated," she said.
The ADI chief executive, Jan Creamer, called the law "groundbreaking".
The group's investigators in Bolivia worked side-by-side with circus workers and filmed disturbing mistreatment, she said, adding that poorly paid and badly trained workers routinely abused animals. "If they wanted an animal to move, their immediate reaction was a kick or a punch or a shove," she said.
She said circus animals suffer everywhere – including in developed countries – from living in tight quarters and being constantly transported.
"It's rather as if you and I were asked to spend the rest of our lives living in our bathroom," said Creamer. "In Bolivia there were three brown bears being kept in tiny compartments just 2 by 3 metres."
The law sets fines for infractions and allows for animals to be confiscated by authorities, added Flores.
The Guardian 31/07/09
For more information on the work of Animal Defenders International click here
Twiggy Loses Face
Posted 19/07/2009
The sixties model Twiggy has signed up to be the new face of Olay, twenty five years after she first become the face of this ‘anti-aging’ product. Olay is manufactured by the notorious animal-testing pharmaceutical company Procter & Gamble.
What makes this so absurd is that Twiggy was one of the celebrity supporters of the anti-Herbal Essences ‘The Agony Behind The Ecstasy’ campaign run by Uncaged. She is photographed on their campaigning leaflet stating ‘I support Uncaged’s campaign to highlight Procter & Gamble’s unnecessary testing of beauty products on animals and to encourage Procter & Gamble to end all animal tests on cosmetics’ Uncaged are now having to re-design and print new leaflets without the ‘new face of Olay’ which for a small campaigning group is money most needed elsewhere. For more information please visit the Uncaged website.
Cricket: The same old balls
Posted 19/07/2009
Merseyside Animal Rights took the opportunity of a Northern Animal Rights Coalition meeting in Liverpool on July 12th to relaunch the campaign against Cricket on Mathew St. With the support of visiting activists from Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds, Cumbria, Blackpool, Newton Le Willows & Boston, Massachusetts(!) a large and noisy demo was held outside the shop, which continues to sell real animal fur, including rabbit imported from China, to overpaid celebrities with no taste, despite their pledges to the Liverpool Echo that they would not restock. A quick glance at their racks revealed 8 full-length fur coats currently in stock, in defiance of the campaign.
So it was definitely time to return to visit them after a long absence and the acquittal of an activist arrested on spurious charges at an earlier demo. Cricket were most definitely dismayed that this attempt at intimidation failed and to see us back, letting shoppers and tourists know about the blood on the shop’s hands. The police took longer to arrive than usual, the shop evidently having misplaced the piece of paper with Officer 8008’s direct phone number, thinking they wouldn’t need it again. Two cop cars blocked the street in time-honoured fashion, while the occupants failed in their attempt to limit our numbers and were stumped by their failure to locate a designated spokesman.
The great English weather failed to dampen the spirits of those assembled, who know the sun never shines on Mathew St in any weather (the permanent coldness possibly emanating from the dark heart of Cricket) and don't expect a warm reception from Justine Mills and her staff. We will be back (with scarves & gloves if necessary!) until they stop supporting the barbaric fur trade and join the 21st Century (although many of the fashions displayed in their window suggest a timewarp back to 1975).
To view original article visit Indymedia
Paul McCartney backs 'Meat Free Monday' to cut carbon emissions
Posted 21/06/2009
Sir Paul McCartney has followed in the footsteps of the world's leading climate scientist and a small Belgian town by calling on people to go meat-free one day a week and cut carbon emissions.
Backed by celebrities ranging from Chris Martin to Sheryl Crow, McCartney today launched his Meat Free Monday campaign asking households to cut out meat on Mondays and slow global warming.
"I think many of us feel helpless in the face of environmental challenges, and it can be hard to know how to sort through the advice about what we can do to make a meaningful contribution to a cleaner, more sustainable, healthier world," said McCartney. "Having one designated meat free day a week is actually a meaningful change that everyone can make, that goes to the heart of several important political, environmental and ethical issues all at once."
Reducing meat consumption didn't just slow climate change, he said, but would help to fight global hunger and improve the welfare of animals.
Last year the world's leading authority on climate change, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, told the Observer that going meat-free once a week was the "most attractive" way for individuals to reduce emissions. Earlier this year The Guardian revealed that hospitals in the NHS were taking meat off menus as part of a strategy to cut greenhouse gas emissions, while just last month the Belgian town of Ghent announced plans to make every Thursday a meat-free day.
The links between meat and climate change have been well-known for several years. A UN study in 2006 showed that the livestock industry was responsible for a staggering 18% of man's global greenhouse gas emissions, partly because of deforestation in the Amazon.
McCartney's meat-free mission will be supported by several high-profile chefs, including Giorgio Locatelli and Yotam Ottolenghi, who have created vegetarian recipes for the campaign's website. Linda McCartney Foods is also promoting the message, while Oliver Peyton and other restaurant owners will be highlighting meat-free dishes. The ongoing campaign hopes in future to measure the number of people switching to meat-free Mondays and reducing CO2 emissions.
McCartney's move follows last week's government reshuffle that now sees two vegetarians, Jim Fitzpatrick and Hilary Benn, holding the two most senior positions at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
Global Boycott Procter & Gamble Day XIII
Posted 10/05/09
Please unite with fellow activists for the thirteenth Global Boycott P&G Day on Saturday 16th May 2009 to expose the callous animal testing practices of the world’s largest consumer goods corporation, and makers of Herbal Essences.
With your help, we can give millions of consumers the information they need to vote with their purses and help save innocent animals from deadly poisoning tests. If we want to protect animals, it’s vital to empower consumers to pressure companies like P&G directly.
Hurtful Essences
This year, in order to ramp up the effectiveness of this day of action, Uncaged are encouraging our fellow campaigners to focus on one of P&G’s most infamous brands - ‘Herbal Essences’. We launched the boycott of Herbal Essences (a P&G hair care brand) in July 2008 when we revealed that P&G scientists had poisoned and killed over a thousand animals and their babies in a gratuitous test for a chemical ingredient (butylparaben) already in use by humans for decades.
Targeting this recognised brand name has made a significant difference to the success of the campaign. Interestingly, narrowing the focus actually makes it easier for many more people to make the first step to compassionate enlightenment as they begin to discover the true horror of the whole animal testing industry.
What You Need To Do
Please get involved by organising or helping with a Boycott P&G event in your area. For ideas, you can check out more photos and reports from last year’s Day here and here. Click here for a downloadable in-depth guide to participating in Global Boycott P&G Day.
Actions can include protests, stunts, street theatre, stalls and leafleting in town centres and at supermarkets/personal care stores (e.g. Boots). You can also help by organising protests at P&G sites, or displays and information events at your college, library, health-food shop, or workplace, and/or by firing off letters to all your regional media and online forums.
Last year’s Day was the biggest ever with over 250 different actions across the world. Let’s make the 2009 event even bigger and bring renewed hope for those animals at risk from abuse at the hands of P&G and other animal testers. Remember, without YOU, animals are defenceless and vulnerable to the brutality of P&G.
Merseyside Animal Rights will be in Bold Street in Liverpool on Saturday 16th May to support the thirteenth Global Boycott P&G Day.
For more information please visit Uncaged
Animal rights campaigners have won a three-year battle to secure a ban on the sale of seal products in Europe.
Posted 10/05/09
Euro MPs today voted 550-49 in favour of the embargo, which will affect hunters in Canada and Norway who clubbed at least 215,000 seal pups to death last year. The ban will not only apply to clothing made from seals, like fur coats and kilt sporrans, but also other products derived from the mammal and turned into oil and even omega 3 pills.
'This law is a victory for people power and a credit to the campaigners involved,' said Labour MEP Arlene McCarthy. More than 400 MEPs launched a seal ban campaign in 2006 after growing complaints from the public. It excludes the small trade in seal products which indigenous people living in the Arctic rely on.
Nicki Brooks, director of Respect for Animals, said: 'This is a truly fantastic day for the seals. This ban will save the lives of millions.' The vote is not expected to affect Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper's trip to Prague today, where he hopes to discuss strengthening trade with the EU. Canadian fisheries minister Gail Shea said: 'The decision by the European Parliament lacks any basis in facts. It will have a devastating impact on thousands of Canadian families who rely on the seal hunt for part of their