A PAIN THEY NEVER FORGET

A woman is suing the Los Angeles Zoo for the pending separation of two female elephants, age 42 and 45, whose breakup she says threatens their welfare, and the Humane Society backs her up. I don't know the specifics of the relationship of these two elephants, but the way humans generally treat elephants doesn't lend much credence to the zoo's claim that they're just doing it for the elephant's own good.

One former circus worker confirms that elephants are universally mistreated within that institution, according to the Christian Science Monitor, "managed by the use of force and intimidation, controlled by bullhooks or worse and used where they will cause the greatest pain. Former animal trainers have admitted that muzzles, whips, electric prods, and even baseball bats are used to tame and train. Newly captured animals are tied down and beaten until they obey." Even then, they don't always perform as advertised: Circus animal trainer John Cuneo knows this as one of his elephants killed its handler in Hawaii and had to be killed by police. Now his farm is charged with 47 violations of the Animal Welfare Act and some are calling for elephants' removal from it. Meanwhile, just for context, in parts of Africa poachers are killing elephants left and right. the latest bunch "mowed down seven elephants including a baby" inside a Ugandan National Park. Africa is where the elephants like Ruby, the African elephant the L.A. Zoo wants to ship out, come from. Do we do them a favor by bringing them out of the fire and into the frying pan?

ONCE AGAIN: WESTERN DIET = PROSTATE CANCER

When Japanese men move to the U.S. and start eating plenty of high-fat burgers and pizza and less soy, their risk of prostate cancer increases. But so far, much of this evidence has been anecdotal. A recent study compared genetically similar Japanese men in the US and Japan to examine why our prostate cancer rate is 10 times theirs. What it found was that "the Japanese-American men reported eating a diet substantially higher in animal fat. Not surprisingly, they also had a greater percentage of body fat and higher triglyceride levels in their blood."

UPDATE 5/16: Once again: Broccoli = Prostate Cancer Fighter

ANIMAL SACRIFICE TO DECLINE IN 21st CENTURY?

The assumption has always been that animals' lives have to be sacrificed to our understanding of medical issues, in everything from drug and cosmetics research to med-school dog labs. The tide is turning, but far too many tests are still being done because of inertia. In Britain, a Member of Parliament has officially urged the Government to reduce the use of animals for medical and scientific research, and at least one new test will accomplish that goal. Meanwhile, stateside, the Urbana-Champaign Senate approved a new dissection policy forcing instructors to provide alternatives to animal dissection in general courses, and giving principled upper-level students "the opportunity to appeal to the department if dissection alternatives are not offered." And just across the border, the USDA, of all agencies, is cracking down on "problems with Northwestern university's tracking and handling of research animals." It's a start. It's a start.

SLAUGHTERING ANIMALS RESULTS in SICKNESS

While no one seems willing to nail it down as fact, more and more reporters and commentators are addressing the probability that SARS arose from the animal trade in China. Laurie Garrett of Newsday says SARS linked to animal markets, while SFGate more elegantly mentions that SARS' origins may lie in China's exotic cuisine. A new AP story says SARS probably originated in animal, many experts say, and some op-ed writers are asking point-blank, "Did meat consumption cause SARS?" Meanwhile, as a reminder that it's not just one exotic disease, scientists at Edinburgh's Moredun Research Institute warn of a hidden risk of disease from animals: "Horses, cows, pigs ... are among other carriers of bacteria that pose an unknown risk to humans." Yep, it's all still unknown. But there sure are a lot of clues...

IT'S NOT JUST THE STENCH

"Hog-farm-cesspool gases tied to nerve damage," blares this NY Times story (reprinted in the Charlotte Observer), explaining that toxic ammonia, hydrogen sulfide routinely escape from the lagoons holding the excess of animal feces and urine produced by factory farming. "22 times in April, the gases exceeded the state's recommended air standards of 15 parts per billion of hydrogen sulfide," the Times notes, adding that levels got higher than four times the cutoff point for dangerous emissions of this gas as well as 150 parts per billion of ammonia. This is "a level that would have exceeded the air standards for at least six other states." Good point. Everybody in other states arguing with county boards about large hog farms, please take note: NERVE DAMAGE, fer chrissakes.

I HATE TO SAY I TOLD YOU SO...

Sorry, did I say "hate?" I meant "love." So please remember once again that the original "fast-food lawsuit" was a pointless, frivolous enterprise that would achieve nothing... except here, where I... well, told you so: "Fast food joints may soon get singled out by U.S. health czar Tommy Thompson if they don't shape up and stop feeding the country's obesity problem," sez Reuters.

UPDATE 5/12: It's not just Tommy Thompson, either: WHO Urges Food Companies to Help Improve Diet

BAD EGGS

A former employee of an egg production facility claims she was unlawfully terminated for failing to take part in alleged illegal activities and is asking that a court award an unspecified amount in damages. According to the lawsuit, Goble alleges her "constructive discharge" was brought about after she refused to:
* tag products as "organic" when they were really "non-organic,"
* change tags on barns regarding the crating and labeling of caged birds as cage-free birds,
* "go along with" waste violations and the pollution of local rivers,
* engage in the unlawful disposal of dead birds

Well, I'm sure they're not having anyone else do any of that now. And of course it's a good thing this came to light, since it's surely the only place where this was or is going on...

YOU WASTED A PERFECTLY FINE DOG!

So this dumbass gets drunk, comes home and kicks his dog. So what, right? Well, a couple interesting things. One, he kicks the dog to death, Two, he's blind, and Three, he actually gets jail time for the killing. But here's the real, er, kicker: The judge says "The thing that upsets me most is if you didn't want the [guide] dog, why not give it back? You not only took the dog, but you also took someone's sight." ...uh, yeah, that IS the most upsetting part of a guy kicking his own guide dog to death. And if the poor thing hadn't been a guide dog, would this loser be in jail? I wonder.

SHOCKED, SHOCKED!

Family shocked by horse's slaying blares the headline, and well they might be. '"She was a gorgeous mare, jet black, with a beautiful mane and tail," Marcia Mickelson said as her husband and kids loaded two Hereford cattle into a trailer...'
No, the cattle weren't on their way to be slaughtered... yet, though of course they will be ultimately. It's a mystery to me how people can miss the 10,000-decibel irony in this story, even without dragging in the fact that the horse was bred as part of an institutionally corrupt industry or that Texas still routinely turns horses into meat. '"The hardest thing to think of is what trauma she went through, and she's my daughter's pet," Mickelson said, her voice tinged with sorrow and quiet anger.' That's all true, and tragic, but howcum a horse goes through trauma in being killed but not a cow? A horse goes through trauma being hunted down, but not a deer? What is the freakin' difference? Do grown adults honestly believe that an animal is soulless unless and until we bestow our love on it, and then its life magically acquires value, it becomes "real" like a velveteen rabbit? That seems to be the prevailing sentiment, and frankly, it boggles my mind.

UPDATE 5/8: $13,700 reward for tips on truck driver who mowed down mare. "We're going to go ahead and exhaust the fund" in hopes of catching the assailant, said the humane society director. Meanwhile, the line between acceptable and unacceptable animal abuse gets thinner and thinner as a farmer is found guilty of animal cruelty, neglect in deaths of cows ...but only because they starved to death.

DO FISH FEEL PAIN?

It's another jab in the seemingly endless back-and-forth of fish do/don't/do/don't feel pain, as scientists now say fish exhibit behavior indicating pain when they're hurt. But critics will pull out the different structure of the piscine nervous system to say we can't tell whether it means the same to them as it would to us, and on and on. All of which simply obscures the basic issue of removing fish from their daily lives to hurt and/or kill them: Why does it need to be done at all? If your answer is "for food," you may be as surprised as I was that trout farmers are complaining that Allowing fish to suffocate is cruel. With fish, I guess, it's a verrrry slippery slope.

UPDATE 5/16: Heh. Slippery slope indeed: Now the same question is being asked, again by the fishermen themselves, about lobsters.

PILGRIM'S SHAME

That massive listeria recall from late last summer lives on in a new "wrongful death" lawsuit filed by a widow whose husband ate Pilgrim's Pride deli meat and died with the same strain of listeria as that found in the "Wampler" plant. Here's hoping the negligence and apathy of the USDA, which played such a huge part in this story, is a casualty of the spotlight, bringing a semblance of a silver lining to this egregious tragedy.

LETTUCE SPRAY

Some commentators are gleefully recounting the story of lettuce contaminated with Perchlorate (courtesy of Lockheed Martin) and possibly causing trouble for people who eat it. Oddly, there hasn't been so much talk about the 42 children at Laraway Elementary School in Joliet who were rushed to a hospital after eating chicken with 133 times the accepted level of ammonia because the schools weren't informed of the ammonia contamination. Either way, it's worth remarking here that any food can be contaminated by an external source. Animal foods, though, bring their own potentially-fatal-disease-causing bacteria right there in their own package.

UPDATE 5/6: More on the Perchlorate/Lockheed Martin issue - the Bush Administration imposes a gag order. "BUSH ADMINISTRATION IS IGNORING POSSIBILITY OF SERIOUS HEALTH EFFECTS," sez The San Jose Mercury News. So, refreshingly, it's not just dangerous meat companies these folks will step in to protect, it's also dangerous defense contractors.

HEALTHY ALTERNATIVES? NO NEED TO SEARCH

Is it a coincidence that one of our culture's most powerful, cutting-edge companies has, at its cafeteria, at least one entree per meal (and a salad, and a side) that's vegetarian, usually vegan, often explicitly identified as such? Man, now even I wanna work there! No wonder these folks are takin' over the world! (via Iconomy)

GOOD NEWS FOR A CHANGE

It's not all gloom and doom, folks - turns out that certain types of tea, long known to protect against cancer, also boost the immune system. Plus, eating oatmeal regularly keeps kids from getting obese, says "the first study to use a large national sample of children and analyse the role of fibre in obesity." And it's just been found that "peanuts lower triglycerides and improve total diet quality by increasing a number of nutrients associated with the prevention of heart disease." Additionally, more benefits are being found for vitamin E, an antioxidant that protects the body from oxygen damage and may help fight against certain cancers. Here's where you can get it: "Great sources: Total and Product 19 cereals; whole-grain hot and cold cereals; sunflower seeds; almonds; cottonseed and soybean oil; margarine; and strawberries, amaranth, farro, kasha and quinoa. Good sources: vegetable-oil based salad dressings; corn oil; margarine; peanuts and peanut butter; tomato juice and processed tomatoes, such as tomato puree and tomato paste; and leafy green vegetables, such as spinach, beet, mustard greens, collard greens, Swiss chard, kale and Romaine lettuce." Gosh... what do all these foods in this post have in common?

ANOTHER BIG STINK

A scientific panel, the Institute of Medicine, says lawsuits against the government are "casting doubt on its authority to enforce food safety laws." But what to do about the problem? Um, gosh, er... ENFORCE FOOD SAFETY LAWS, maybe? Nope, that would be too simple. Instead let's have more laws to stop people from filing lawsuits against manure-spewing farms that destroy area residents' quality of life ("Bryan Burgess of St. Clair County has fainted from the stink of a hog farm near his home, and the creek he pictured full of children instead swims with E. coli."). But for the animal-abuse industry, that's still not enough: A county board has asked Minnesota to make all the state's feedlot locations top secret. The article notes that if this happens, "someone looking to buy a farm house, for instance, wouldn't have an automatic right to check records to see how close feedlots were or where the resulting manure is spread" (gee, wonder what they'll do once they find out? Hello, lawsuits!). The whole thing is supposedly predicated on fighting "terrorists," but the County Commissioner "wondered whether the county was labeling [animal-rights] activists as terrorists simply because they don't support animal agriculture." And the concept of hiding huge livestock operations from real terrorists is laughable. Even if they were too lazy to research the location info in other ways, they could, as one activist points out, simply "follow their noses."

SHAC TACTICS LTD.?

I've had a problem with reports of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty using aggressive, terroristic tactics in an attempt to bully Huntingdon's employees and investors out of what they're doing (animal experimentation) and the injunction barring them from getting anywhere near employees' homes shows how far (too far) the group has pushed its luck. In the meanwhile, a different group, Uncaged Campaigns, has achieved a stunning victory with a non-bullying courtroom approach, forcing the release of a huge volume of confidential documents that detail how, once again, the experimentation was rife with fraud, illegality, and government collusion.

"In total," reports The Observer, "the documents reveal at least 520 errors and omissions," many of which resulted in needless and painful animal deaths. "The documents show that a quarter of the primates died from 'technical failures'." The paper continues, "Many of the 1,274 pages of documents reveal a litany of failings that will serve to ignite further controversy over HLS ... Fundamental questions over the value of vivisection itself will also be asked." Yes, let's hope so.

THE GREENING OF AMERICA

The California assembly has approved a resolution on vegetarian options in school lunches (it now goes to the state senate). And not a moment too soon: Veggie-oriented students are multiplying, from USC college kids all the way down to vegan preschoolers, and many in between, like this college-graduating 13-year-old. Even in traditonal lunchrooms, regular-kid trends are interesting: "We looked at what foods kids are actually taking and actually throwing away,' school board member Bob Stranger said. "We found they ate a lot of peas,' Stranger said. "Peaches and peas were a heavily consumed item -- whereas often with the corndogs and hotdogs -- that's another story."

POULTRY EMERGENCY WRIT LARGE

The bird flu that's hammering the California poultry industry and causing Poultry Emergencies in neighboring states has now spread to Texas. And in Europe, an outbreak in the Netherlands has spilled into Belgium, which just announced two more cases, and is nearing Germany. A quarter of a million birds in Belgium are being slaughtered, while the Dutch have already killed eleven million - 10% of the country's entire flock - yet new cases of the disease are still being found. News stories are careful to note that the flu isn't dangerous to humans - at least they were until this weekend, when a veterinarian "died of pneumonia after catching the bird flu, raising fears that a mutated version of the avian virus could cause a SARS-type human epidemic." Great. All this so some people can enjoy their KFC and McNuggets.

UPDATE 5/13: It's now spread to Germany.

ORGANIC FIGHTS BACK

Consumers want organic foods, and are willing to pay, even though they're constantly being told (falsely) that such foods are no more nutritious or less harmful than conventional. The only major obstacle is the credibility of the "organic" designation. Last week, that obstacle was flattened - at least for now. A rider to the 2003 spending bill, "Written for the benefit of a Georgia poultry farm, would have allowed farmers to label meat and dairy products as organic without using 100 percent organic feed if the price of organic feed was more than twice that of conventional feed." Thanks to Patrick Leahy and Sam Farr, this BS was eliminated from the bill. As to the anti-organic rider, "it was just such a sleazy way of going about it because consumers wouldn't know what they were buying," said Barbara Haumann, spokeswoman for the Organic Trade Association. Yep, sleazy - the meat industry's middle name.

WHERE THE DEER AND THE ANTELOPE...?

Chronic Wasting Disease is on the rise in Wyoming. In the Billings Gazette: The number of documented cases of chronic wasting disease continued to increase in Wyoming in 2002, say. "This tells us that it's spreading," said [one wildlife researcher]. "There are a lot of folks that haven't wanted to buy into it spreading, but this clearly shows it has extended its range where we didn't expect it to be, which really isn't good news."