Torched Puppy Deserves Law in His Honor to Protect Other Animals
HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.
In the wake of the horrifying case of Buddy, a dog who was severely burned as a puppy by a youth in Mississippi, Buddy's Law was introduced, which would allow law enforcement and justices to hold youths accountable for their acts of violence. It was in severe danger of being killed, but revived at the last minute and will now go to the Senate for a vote. Please thank Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann for allowing this important bill to move forward and to encourage his continued support of animal-friendly legislation and to ask Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves to sign it into law.
Sen. Angela Hill, who has been instrumental in updating animal protection legislation in Mississippi, introduced Buddy's Law (SB 2261) in response to this horrific case. Buddy's abuser could not be prosecuted because Mississippi law prohibits the prosecution of youth offenders under the age of 13.
However, further issues with this case highlight the need for more avenues to deal with violent youth offenders.
The youth in this case was already previously involved in the fatal shooting of his stepsister before torturing Buddy, and just months after he turned 13, he was charged with capital murder for fatally burning another youth who had befriended him.
It's just been passed by the Judiciary B Committee and is expected to be voted on quickly by the Senate.
It is imperative that youths who do harm get the mental health evaluation and treatment they need to prevent a life of troubles and incarceration for them and the devastating harm their potential victims would endure. In Defense of Animals and kindred Mississippi organizations are acting to end the cycle of violence that minors and their victims are not currently protected from.
Please thank Lt. Gov. Hosemann for moving Buddy's Law forward and giving it a chance to pass and please also ask Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves to sign it into law.
Sign our letter to deliver your comments to:
Lt. Governor Hosemann
Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves
In Defense of Animals fully expects and strongly urges all people involved in this campaign to act responsibly and lawfully and to respect the personal interests and privacy rights and concerns of any individuals who may be affected by, or become the subject of, your protests or related efforts.
Thank you for visiting our animal defence section. Before leaving, please join us in a moment of compassion and reflection.
The wheels of business and human food compulsions are implacable and totally lacking in compassion. This is a downed cow, badly hurt, but still being dragged to slaughter. Click on this image to fully appreciate this horror repeated millions of times every day around the world. With plentiful non-animal meat substitutes that fool the palate, there is no longer reason for this senseless suffering. Meat consumption is a serious ecoanimal crime. The tyranny of the palate must be broken. Please consider changing your habits in this regard.
ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS.
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Canada: Ban Live Horse Exports for Slaughter
HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.
Let's hope he delivers at least on this issue. Otherwise, Trudeau's tenure will be as horridly disappointing as that of his Washington-kowtowing predecessors.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has called for a mandate banning the export of live horses overseas for slaughter. Every year Canada sends live horses under horrifying conditions to Japan for slaughter, to arrive as a horse meat “delicacy” on Japanese menus. Now we must convince the agency that has that decision to follow through.
Live export involves large draft horses being tightly packed in containers where they have no access to food or water for hours on end. Many are injured and even die before arrival.
We commend the leadership of Trudeau for listening to the Canadian citizens. His mandate calling for the ban was sent to Marie-Claude Bibeau, the Canadian Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food.
This is especially needed as live horse exports to Japan for slaughter increased by 51.8% through September 2021 over the same period in 2020.
Please make calls and comments on social media and send our letter to Marie-Claude Bibeau, the Canadian Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food.
1. Call. Please make one simple phone call to the Canadian Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food at 1-855-773-0241 on weekdays from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. CT.
State your name, your town or city, and telephone number. Be courteous. You may wish to say:
Please honor the request of Prime Minister Trudeau who has called for a mandate banning the export of live horses overseas for slaughter. Horses suffer when tightly packed into containers without food and water for long flights overseas. Banning this practice is the right thing to do and the world is looking to Canada to take this action.
2. Take It to Social Media.
Send a message on Twitter to Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.
Stop the live export of #Horses to #Slaughter overseas @AAFC_Canada. Prime Minister Trudeau has done the right thing calling for this ban. Horses suffer horribly during this process.
3. Write. Please send our email (with your personal touch) to the Canadian Minister of Agriculture and Agri-food
Sign our alert to immediately deliver your comments to:
The Honourable Marie-Claude Bibeau — Minister of Agriculture and Agri-food
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
In Defense of Animals fully expects and strongly urges all people involved in this campaign to act responsibly and lawfully and to respect the personal interests and privacy rights and concerns of any individuals who may be affected by, or become the subject of, your protests or related efforts.
Thank you for visiting our animal defence section. Before leaving, please join us in a moment of compassion and reflection.
The wheels of business and human food compulsions are implacable and totally lacking in compassion. This is a downed cow, badly hurt, but still being dragged to slaughter. Click on this image to fully appreciate this horror repeated millions of times every day around the world. With plentiful non-animal meat substitutes that fool the palate, there is no longer reason for this senseless suffering. Meat consumption is a serious ecoanimal crime. The tyranny of the palate must be broken. Please consider changing your habits in this regard.
ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS.
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The National Anti-Roadkill Project is Gearing-up to Implement Its Mission
HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.
PRLOG has kindly sent us the following press release, and we are delighted to reproduce it below:
The National Anti-Roadkill Project (NARP) is proud to announce its rebirth after it hit the stage in the NYTimes with: "A Highway Campaign to Save Animals". However, it never took off, as the concept was ahead of its time. Its time has now arrived.
Momma Bear and cubs, waiting for propitious moment to cross the road. Far too many times, a lethal event. (Bear And Cubs Off I 64 Near Charlotsville, VA)
JUPITER, Fla. - Nov. 23, 2021 - PRLog -- Jupiter, Florida - - After being dormant since the early 1990s, NARP is in the process of gearing-up for its rebirth. At the time, governmental agencies, philanthropists and the private sector were not ready to support an organization whose mission was to protect wildlife from the hazards of our roads and highways. NARP's co-founder, Ira Fischer, believes that there are strong indications that its time has finally arrived.
Fischer points to the fact that President Biden recently signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 into law. It provides $350 million for new wildlife crossings to improve habitat connectivity. These funds will make roads less lethal for wildlife that must cross for their survival. It will also create passages across roads that otherwise would result in habitat fragmentation by blocking migration routes.
The fatalities of tens of millions of animals on our nation's roads need to be addressed full-throttle by an NGO dedicated to mitigating this carnage. While a few organizations, on occasion, embark upon this need on a local level, none have as their mission to ameliorate the roadkill issue.
Mother cat with dead kitten.
NARP distinguished itself as the only entity that is exclusively dedicated to protect wildlife from the hazards of our roads. The mission of NARP is to protect America's wildlife that are at risk when forced to cross highways and roads for their survival. NARP is committed to significantly reduce the over 1 million deaths daily and countless crippling injuries that wildlife suffers as a result of vehicular traffic. This endeavor is particularly critical for endangered species, such as the Florida panther whose leading cause of mortality is motor vehicle collisions.
The time is long past due to address this vital issue head-on with a new paradigm that finds it unacceptable to continue the mindset that maiming and killing wildlife is simply a price to pay for the convenience of driving in the modern age. NARP will champion intolerance for the needless toll suffered by animals on our roads by embarking on campaigns to address this matter with a multi-dimensional approach commensurate with the magnitude of the problem. NARP will launch a website once it is fully operational. In the interim, you can learn more about NARP on the Roads Kill page of Fischer's personal website.
About Ira Fischer
NARP's Director Ira Fischer
NARP's co-founder, Ira Fischer, devotes his retirement from the practice of law to the cause of animal welfare through advocacy. The mission of Fischer's personal website is Kindness and Compassion for Animals. Whenever Fischer comes across an injured animal on a road, or by its side, he tries his darned best to rescue the creature.
Regarding NARP, Ira is unusually generous in recognising the role played by fellow animal rights activist Patrice Greanville in this particular field: "I give special thanks to Patrice Greanville, who was the visionary that founded the National Anti-Roadkill Project in the early 1990s. Patrice was a man ahead of his time, but, hopefully, the time has finally arrived for NARP to implement its mission. I am forever grateful to Patrice, who took me under his wings and showed me the path to his noble goal."
Thank you for visiting our animal defence section. Before leaving, please join us in a moment of compassion and reflection.
The wheels of business and human food compulsions are implacable and totally lacking in compassion. This is a downed cow, badly hurt, but still being dragged to slaughter. Click on this image to fully appreciate this horror repeated millions of times every day around the world. With plentiful non-animal meat substitutes that fool the palate, there is no longer reason for this senseless suffering. Meat consumption is a serious ecoanimal crime. The tyranny of the palate must be broken. Please consider changing your habits in this regard.
ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS.
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Blood on the pavement
Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.
For the leopards of north India, the road to extinction is paved.
Deadly encounters with cars pose a serious threat to the continued survival of the regal cat in that region, as well as dozens of other animals across the globe, according to a new study of how the world’s fast-growing web of roads affects thousands of species.
The research sheds light on the magnitude of the roadside carnage and how an individual species’ biology can intersect with traffic deaths to endanger its future survival. Scientists hope it could also help alert road builders and government agencies to potential problem spots amid a construction spree that could add millions more kilometers of pavementby 2050.
In some cases, including the leopard in India, animals “are at risk of local extinction in the near future if observed levels of roadkill persist,” said Manuela González-Suárez, an ecologist at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, who took part in the research.
The lethality of cars is readily apparent to anyone who has dodged dead squirrels, opossums, cats and other critters that litter roadsides—commonly known as roadkill. Less obvious is the scale of the damage to the world’s wildlife and the threat such deaths pose to entire species. For example, wild guinea pigs that reproduce quickly might make for a lot of roadkill. But that could pose less risk than for bears that have fewer individuals and offspring. Scientists from six continents set out to produce a more detailed global picture of the dangers roadkill pose to biodiversity.
Rather than sift through rotting carcasses, this team left the dirty work to others. They compiled previous studies measuring local or regional roadkill between 1995 and 2015 – more than 1,300 reports covering 392 different kinds of mammals. The results showed that among large animals, moose were at most risk of being killed—as many as 1.17 per kilometer per year. For smaller animals, guinea pigs earned the unfortunate honor at more than a dozen per kilometer per year in some places.
But understanding the danger to an overall species, and to the thousands of mammals not directly counted, required more sophisticated computer work. To estimate how roadkill levels would influence the fate of a local population, the researchers factored in the overall density of a particular species in a region and key biological traits that can affect population growth, such as the lifespan and number of offspring. To expand the analysis to more than 4,600 different mammal species, they identified which traits most affected the roadkill risk for different types of animals, and then calculated the risks posed to animals that shared those traits, even if they weren’t directly counted in roadkill studies.
The results showed that roadkill posed a problem for populations of 83 species considered at risk by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, according to the study published in September in Global Ecology and Biogeography.
Deaths from traffic collisions are severe enough that they could endanger the survival of four different regional populations of animals over the next 50 years, the scientists warned. That includes the leopard in north India, the brown hyena in southern Africa, and the maned wolf and little spotted cat in South America. Other vulnerable animals highlighted by the research include Spain’s Iberian lynx, black and brown bears, jaguars and lion tailed macaques.
The findings show the importance of considering the potential effect of roadkill when governments plan to build new roads, said Clara Grilo, a conservation biology researcher at the University of Lisbon in Portugal, and the study’s lead author. In some places, agencies have begun adapting roadways to make them more wildlife friendly, for example by building bridges or tunnels that animals can use to avoid traffic. The new approach to calculating the danger posed by roadkills can be used to find “where roadkill monitoring programs are most needed to evaluate risk and trigger the most appropriate measures to avoid local extinctions,” said Grilo.
The need for such measures could only increase as road construction surges. When the scientists mapped the locations of species most at risk from roadkill, sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia stand out as global hotspots where biodiversity and traffic already collide. Those same regions are also where a road boom is forecasted in the coming years as economies grow. “Emerging market countries will need to develop their connecting infrastructure,” acknowledged González-Suárez. But “it is essential that ecologists and conservation scientists are consulted.”
Warren Cornwall is an environmental, science and outdoor recreation journalist whose stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times, Science, Slate, the Boston Globe Magazine, Outside online, National Geographic News, and The Seattle Times. He is a contributing correspondent for the journal Science. He is also the faculty advisor for Western Washington University's The Planet magazine, a student-run publication based at the Huxley College of the Environment.
Thank you for visiting our animal defence section. Before leaving, please take a moment to reflect on these mind-numbing institutionalized cruelties. The wheels of business and human food compulsions—often exacerbated by reactionary creeds— are implacable and totally lacking in compassion. This is a downed cow, badly hurt, but still being dragged to slaughter. Click on this image to fully appreciate this horror repeated millions of times every day around the world. With plentiful non-animal meat substitutes that fool the palate, there is no longer reason for this senseless suffering. And meat consumption is a serious ecoanimal crime. The tyranny of the palate must be broken. Please consider changing your habits and those around you in this regard.
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To Protect Fauci, The Washington Post is Preparing a Hit Piece on the Group Denouncing Gruesome Dog Experimentations
Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.
Typical of the corporate media: the WaPo steps forth to defend the status quo no matter how rotten it is.
Anger over the U.S. Government's gruesome, medically worthless experimentation on adult dogs and puppies has grown rapidly over the last two months. A truly bipartisan coalition in Congress has emerged to demand more information about these experiments and denounce the use of taxpayer funds to enable them. On October 24, twenty-four House members — nine Democrats and fifteen Republicans, led by Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) — wrote a scathing letter to Dr. Anthony Fauci expressing “grave concerns about reports of costly, cruel, and unnecessary taxpayer-funded experiments on dogs commissioned by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases." Similar protests came in the Senate from a group led by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY).
The campaign to end these indescribably cruel, taxpayer-funded experiments on dogs has been underway for years, long before Dr. Facui became a political lightning rod. In 2018, I reported on these experiments under the headline "BRED TO SUFFER: Inside the Barbaric U.S. Industry of Dog Experimentation.” That article described “a largely hidden, poorly regulated, and highly profitable industry in the United States that has a gruesome function: breeding dogs for the sole purpose of often torturous experimentation, after which the dogs are killed because they are no longer of use.”
Along with the videographer Leighton Woodhouse, I also produced a two-minute video report which used footage from experimentation labs filmed by activists with the animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) to show the graphic, excruciating horrors to which these dogs are subjected (the video, which is hard to watch, is appended to the bottom of this article). In our reporting, we noted the cruel irony driving how and why particular dogs are selected for this short life of suffering and misery and detailed just some of the barbarism involved:
The majority of dogs bred and sold for experimentation are beagles, which are considered ideal because of their docile, human-trusting personality. In other words, the very traits that have made them such loving and loyal companions to humans are the ones that humans exploit to best manipulate them in labs. . . .They are often purposely starved or put into a state of severe thirst to induce behavior they would otherwise not engage in. They are frequently bred deliberately to have crippling, excruciating diseases, or sometimes are brought into life just to have their organs, eyes, and other body parts removed and studied as puppies, and then quickly killed.
They are force-fed laundry detergents, pesticides, and industrial chemicals to the point of continuous vomiting and death. They are injected with lethal pathogens such as salmonella or rabies. They have artificial sweetener injected into their veins that causes the dogs’ testicles to shrink before they are killed and exsanguinated. Holes are drilled into their skulls so that viruses can be injected into their brains. And all of that is perfectly legal.
Most of these dogs, after being bred, are "devocalized,” which the advocacy group NAVS describes as “a surgical procedure which makes it physically impossible for the dog to bark.” Though entailing pain and suffering, the procedure prevents the dogs from screaming in pain. As we noted in that article, researchers acknowledge that few to none of these experiments are actually medically necessary. This 2016 op-ed in The San Diego Union-Tribune by Lawrence Hansen, a professor of neuroscience and pathology at the University of California-San Diego School of Medicine who once engaged in experimentation on dogs, explains why he is so ashamed to have participated given their medical worthlessness.
While numerous advocacy groups have been working for years to curb the abuses of these experiments, one group, White Coat Waste Project, has found particular success as a result of an innovative strategy. Advocacy groups know how polarized American politics has become, and that, as a result, a prerequisite for success is constructing a movement that can attract people from all ideologies, who identify with either or neither of the two political parties, but unite in defense of universally held values and principles.
White Coat has accomplished this with great success by fusing the cause of animal rights (long viewed as associated with the left) with opposition to wasteful taxpayer spending (a cause that resonates more on the right). The fact that love for dogs, and animals generally, has grown across all demographic groups further enables them to unite people from across the spectrum, including in Congress, in support of their cause. They routinely attract both Democratic and Republican members of Congress to sign on to their campaigns to end taxpayer-funded experimentation on animals, and are funded almost entirely through small-donor, grass-roots support that comes from the right, the left, and everything in between. Each year, they publicly award members of Congress “who have demonstrated outstanding leadership in the War on Waste, by exposing and stopping $20 billion in wasteful and unnecessary taxpayer-funded animal experiments,” and those honored are always a bipartisan group of lawmakers.
More than any other group, it is White Coat that has elevated the cause of stopping these horrific government experimentations on dogs and puppies into the mainstream political conversation. And numerous media outlets — led by The Washington Post — have spent years publishing flattering profiles on this group and its innovative bipartisan strategies. In November, 2016, for instance, The Postpublished reportingabout White Coat's activities — under the headline: “Should dogs be guinea pigs in government research? A bipartisan group says no” — which heralded the group and its activists for being one of those rare Washington success stories that unites both left and right around a common cause:
“We oppose taxpayer funding of animal experimentation. That’s it,” Bellotti said. “We don’t take a position on cosmetics testing any more than we do on vegan nutrition”. . . . In 2014, a Pew survey found that 50 percent of Americans oppose the use of animals in scientific research, with Democrats and political liberals slightly more opposed than Republicans and conservatives.
“Finding effective ways to limit unnecessary and expensive animal tests is good for taxpayers and is good for our animals,” [Rep. Ken Calvert (R-CA)} said in a statement sent to The Washington Post. “As a member of the Appropriations Committee that funds these agencies, I certainly welcome more analysis on what federal agencies are doing in terms of testing on dogs and other animals. I look forward to collaborating with a bipartisan group of my colleagues in Congress to address this problem.”
Throughout the Trump years, The Post continued to report on the group's work in flattering ways, always emphasizing its purely non-partisan agenda and their ability to bring together left and right. Though The Post once referred to them as “a right-leaning advocacy group,” White Coat has been described by the paper for years as an animal rights group uniting all camps by combating the use of taxpayer dollars for experiments most would find morally reprehensible. After all, during the Trump years, they were protesting experimentations done by agencies controlled by the Trump administration, so heralding their work aligned perfectly with The Post's political agenda of flattering the views of their liberal readers.
BELOW: Excellent explanation by Glenn why biomedical experimentation on non-human animals is morally questionable and most often useless or misleading.
One 2018 Postarticle on White Coat described how “a nonprofit animal rights organization filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday against the U.S. Agriculture Department, seeking information about experiments during which thousands of cats have been euthanized at a facility in Maryland.” A 2020 Postarticle described White Coat as “a small watchdog group that has generated bipartisan congressional opposition to [the Veteran Administration's] dog research by arguing that federal animal testing is a waste of taxpayer dollars.” A 2018 Postarticle on a similar campaign simply described it as “an animal rights group.” A 2017 Postarticle described White Coat's success in recruiting renowned British primatologist Jane Goodall to the cause of stopping cruel FDA experiments on primates, calling it “an advocacy group that says its goal is to publicize and end taxpayer-funded animal experiments.”
So The Post, like most major media outlets, has been reporting on the successes of the White Coat Waste Project fairly and favorably for years. Most people in Washington and in the media regard success in bridging divisions between the citizenry and ideological camps as a desirable and positive objective, and few groups have done that with as much success as White Coat. And thus, along with trans-ideological public support, the group has been lavished with positive media coverage — until now.
Now everything has changed. The government official who oversees the agencies conducting most of these gruesome experiments has become a liberal icon and one of the most sacred and protected figures in modern American political history: Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and President Biden's Chief Medical Advisor. Many of the most horrific experiments, including the ones on dogs and puppies now in the news as a result of White Coat's activism, are conducted by agencies under Fauci's command and are funded by budgets he controls.
As we might expect from a media system that serves as a shield and enabler for a sociopathic order, the mainstream media show no compassion toward animals subjected to institutionalised human cruelty.
In other words, White Coat's activism, which had long generated bipartisan support and favorable media coverage, now reflects poorly on Dr. Fauci. And as a result, The Washington Post has decided to amass a team of reporters to attack the group — the same one the paper repeatedly praised prior to the COVID pandemic — in order to falsely smear it as a right-wing extremist group motivated not by a genuine concern for the welfare of animals or wasteful government spending, but rather due to a partisan desire, based in MAGA ideology, to attack Fauci.
In emails sent last week to the group, Post reporter Beth Reinhard advised them that she wanted “to talk about White Coat Waste and the #beaglegate campaign.” She specifically asked for a wide range of financial documents relating to the group's funding — far beyond what non-profit advocacy groups typically disclose. “May I request your 2020 filing with the IRS,” Reinhard first inquired. White Coat quickly provided that. On October 30, White Coat Vice President Justin Goodman provided even more financial documents — “attached are the Schedule Bs. I’ve also attached a breakdown of our funding sources from 2017-Q3 2021,” he wrote in an email to Reinhard — yet nothing satisfied her, because nothing in these documents was remotely incriminating or helpful to the narrative they were trying to concoct about the group's real, secret agenda.
After White Coat voluntarily provided more and more detailed documentation about its finances, it became obvious what fictitious storyline The Post was attempting to manufacture: that this is a far-right group that is funded by "dark money” from big MAGA donors, motivated by a hatred of science and Dr. Fauci. But in trying to manufacture this false tale, The Post encountered a rather significant obstacle: White Coat is funded almost entirely by small donors, grass-roots citizens who use the group's website to make donations.
Once The Post was repeatedly thwarted in its efforts to concoct the lie that the group is MAGA-funded, Reinhard continued to insist that there must be hidden right-wing funding sources, and even began demanding that White Coat take some sort of bizarre vow never to accept right-wing or "pro-Trump" funding sources in the future. On Monday, she sent them this flailing email:
In response, Goodman — who, prior to joining White Coat, had spent close to a decade as PETA's Director of Laboratory Investigations — pointed out the obvious: “We already have disclosed our largest donor, which is the grassroots, and it's been our largest funder for many years in Democrat and GOP Administrations.” He added: “we have not turned down, solicited or received a dime from any Pro-Trump or conservative groups, nor have any approached us before or during #BeagleGate.” While noting that “some of our other larger supporters, like LUSH Cosmetics, are already public,” Goodman detailed that little has changed in terms of fundraising as a result of this recent campaign targeting cruel experimentations on beagles: “Regarding fundraising, we estimate that Aug-Sep 2021 is approximately 31% lower than the prior period during 2020. And we estimate (and I stress estimate) that fundraising in October 2021 was approximately the same as Sept 2021, give or take."