Vegan News – Page 3

Animal Testing

February 6, 2015 by Tofu Temptress 1 Comment

When I was a kid in the eighties, the anti-vivisection lobby was quite trendy. Everyone I knew bought their cosmetics and toiletries from The Body Shop as they were against animal testing (unfortunately these days they’re owned by L’Oreal) and those who broke into laboratories to liberate bunnies were heroes. Off colour jokes were made about smoking Beagles as Jason and Kylie blasted out of the radio. Then after that I think everyone, in Britain anyway, thought that animal testing had been given up to make way for kinder, more modern methods of safety testing. I hate to say it, but it was as recently as 2013 when Europe decided to make the testing of cosmetics on animals illegal, but only for new products. That means there’s still plenty of shampoos, eye shadows and hairsprays on the market that have been tested on the aforementioned bunnies. Cruelty Free International (formally BUAV) have a campaign going on at the moment to ban the testing of household products on animals. Even though the current government pledged to dramatically reduce the number of animal experiments, they seem to have forgotten all about it.

A happy bunny – Jo-Anne McArthur/We animals

So what’s happening? Well, good question. There are many companies, including the Co-op, Sainsbury’s and Marks and Spencer, who have had cruelty free cosmetics for a number of years and cruelty free household products are available from many supermarkets as well as online. Fine. So it’ll just be a matter of time in Europe before all the old, cruel products become obsolete and the companies that produce them will have to think of other methods of testing when they want to wow us with new products. Well, yes and no. There are loopholes in the legislation and also cosmetics companies who want to sell to China have to, under Chinese law, test everything on animals. So, it’s complicated.

Ok, you say, so if I’m a conscientious shopper I can obtain all my beauty products guilt free in the UK. True, but what about medicine? This has always been a sore point, as it is the law in the UK that you have to test any new drug on a non-human animal i.e. someone who has a working respiratory and cardiovascular system who won’t sue you if things go awry. Again, during my youth, as I was known to be an ‘animal rights sympathiser’ against the cruelty of animal research, and even teachers used to challenge me ‘What if the only way to find out if a drug was safe was to test it on an animal? What if that drug were to cure a disease you’re Mum or Dad had?’ Yes, my teachers were delightful.( It’s almost on a par with any question a vegan is asked that begins with ‘If you were on a desert island…’) The truth is that if the horrid business of animal testing were reliable, we’d have a real debate on our hands, but the fact is that it’s not.

Let’s take penicillin for example. Alexander Fleming originally tested the drug on rabbits and found it to be ineffective. (He may have thrown away the idea if he’d tested it on guinea pigs or hamsters, as it’s fatal to them.) However he was forced to try it on a very sick human patient as there were no alternatives. Here’s a direct quote from the co-discoverer and manufacturer of penicillin, who won a Nobel Prize for his efforts, “How fortunate we didn’t have these animal tests in the 1940s, for penicillin would probably never been granted a license, and possibly the whole field of antibiotics might never have been realized.” Now think about that for a while.

There are countless examples of animal experiments either delaying the release of an important drug (eg. muscle relaxants for general anaesthesia, organ rejection inhibitors, beta-blockers, pace-makers and heart valves amongst others) or of a drug testing as hunky-dory in animal toxicity tests and then going on to blind, injure or kill humans (eg. a first polio vaccine, thalidomide, ADHD medication, asbestos, smoking and countless others). So where does that leave us?

Well, happily, there are several charities lobbying against animal experimentation and some that even conduct human relevant research using modern techniques that mean no suffering to any animal, human or non-human. This research includes everything from skin sensitivities to leukaemia and diabetes, and is widely endorsed by patients, even those with very serious illnesses. New discoveries are being made all the time, without the use of rats, mice, rabbits, monkeys or dogs (yes, it is still legal in Britain to subject Beagles to all sorts of horrors). And as for the question as to whether I’d endorse animal experiments to save a relative or indeed myself, well, there are far more effective methods these days and I’d rather they were used. After all, we cured cancer in mice years ago…

Religious slaughter on the rise

January 31, 2015 by Tofu Temptress Leave a Comment

Depressingly, I noticed in the paper today that the incidence of religious slaughter has increased, by as much as half in some cases, in the last couple of years or so. For the uninitiated, religious slaughter generally means killing an animal without stunning them first. As if the sometimes intensively farmed animals had not gone through enough with their cramped cages, many having never seen outside until the day they’re bundled onto a truck to be taken to what amounts to a torture camp and house of death.

And that’s the interesting thing. Both Kosher and Halal meat is guilty of the non-stunning of animals, and the British government, in their ‘wisdom’ have decided that there should be exemptions to basic animal welfare if there are religious ground – something the British Humanist Society, amongst others, takes issue with. But from the Jewish point of view there are many Jews, including holocaust survivors themselves, that see the factory farming of today as little more than a non-human animal version of the holocaust. In fact, Israel has been flagged up recently as one of the most vegan-friendly countries in the world. Life is certainly no picnic for vegetarian or vegan Muslims either, as this article on an Egyptian festival of sacrifice shows. It seems crazy considering the numerous Islamic teachings that promote kindness towards animals. Many chain restaurants including Pizza Express (whose chicken is all halal), Subway and KFC, have halal options as standard. However, before we go blaming religious people for dragging down animal welfare standards, maybe we should take a long hard look at ourselves.

Pig arrives at a slaughterhouse. Jo-Anne McArthur/We animals

Animal Aid have a campaign going at the moment to try and make it law for there to be properly reviewed CCTV in all slaughterhouses in the UK. This comes from an investigation they did a few years ago, where they randomly chose nine slaughterhouses and filmed secretly inside. They found animal welfare laws being broken, routinely, in eight of them. This included all sorts of horrific behaviour, such as kicking and stamping on animals, grabbing them by their ears and even burning cigarettes out on them. Clearly this is not what the public think they are supporting by ‘buying British’ and so-called high welfare abattoirs seemed to be no better than standard ones. The government doesn’t seem to think we have a problem. They are clearly deluded as to the conditions inside abattoirs, either that, or they don’t care. Either way things need to be cleaned up across the board. Whether slaughter is religious or not (because some halal meat is said to be from stunned animals, but definitions in this area tend to be hazy) we have to sit up and recognise that animals are not things. They are not objects. They feel pain and fear and as Jeremy Bentham the utilitarian philosopher (born in the eighteenth century) said ‘The question is not Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but Can they suffer?’ a sentiment echoed years later by the great Peter Singer in his ground-breaking work ‘Animal Liberation’.

As you will have guessed by now, I have a very simple solution to all of this cruelty, crisis of conscience and confusion. I don’t think we need to point the finger at religious slaughter in particular, or indeed regular slaughterhouses really. We need to point the finger squarely at ourselves. There is no supply where there is no demand. Cut out the middle man and go vegan. Easy.

CCTV for all slaughterhouses. Animal Aid

(If you’d like to help get CCTV into slaughterhouses, sign this petition before 30th March 2015. Thank you.)

The Dairy Crisis

January 20, 2015 by Tofu Temptress Leave a Comment

I’m sure you saw the news in the media recently about the crisis that UK dairy farmers are facing. In a nutshell, too much milk has been produced for not enough demand and farmers are getting a pittance for what they produce from the supermarkets because of this. They’re even getting their payments delayed, which means missing deadlines for bills and so on.

Just before being separated forever – Jo-Anne McArthur/We animals

Now as you may have guessed, I’m not a big fan of the dairy industry, but it is kind of a complex problem. It seems that small dairy farmers are giving up the business due to lack of profits and it is these smaller businesses that tend to graze their cattle outside in the warmer months. Sadly, some small dairies are trying to solve the problem by merging, and this means having cows in sheds all the time. There’s no daylight, no freedom to roam, no joy whatsoever in their lives as working milk machines. Of course, even farmers who do choose to graze their herd outside still have to sell male calves to the meat industry, forcibly separating them from their mothers. They still have to maximise output, meaning unnecessary strain on udders and calcium deficiency in cows. They still have to administer painful injections to stop infection and sell ‘worn out’ mothers for slaughter at the end of it all. I’m not saying that small dairy farmers are living in an idyll, just that they are a degree better than factory farms, where misery is everywhere, all the time. The fact that decreased demand for cows’ milk has led to this sorry state of affairs is odd. The irony is not lost on me.

The calf is wheeled away like rubbish – Jo-Anne McArthur/We animals

And then of course we have the frightening individual that is Liz Truss, our current minister for the environment. She has proposed a raft of measures to combat this dairy crisis, one of which is to reduce the number of dairy inspections by eight thousand a year. It seems lunacy (and if you’ve ever heard her give a speech, this will be of no surprise to you). To reduce inspections, when more farmers feel forced to merge into so-called mega farms, therefore negatively impacting animal welfare significantly at a stroke, seems insane. Viva has a website which is an excellent resource called White Lies which details the fact that when farms attain Soil association, Freedom Foods or Red Tractor accreditation, often all the farmer needs to do is not break the law on the day of the inspection. Standards need to be raised and this means an increase in random, unannounced inspections, not a flippin’ reduction Ms Truss!

The dairy industry doesn’t just impact negatively on the welfare of cows however. The recent badger cull sparked controversy, not just because badgers are cute (well, there may have been a bit of that) but because many scientists felt that badgers were being made the scapegoat by the dairy industry, to explain away the outbreak of bovine TB on their farms. A far more likely explanation seems to be that slurry gets transferred from one dairy farm to another and TB gets transported that way. (Remember foot and mouth.)

Author Patrick Barkham suggests in his novel Badgerlands that perhaps the intensive way cows are reared these days makes their immunity to TB very low. So these mega farms that could become part of the system here in Britain (they’re already the norm in America) could well be creating their own problem (remember mad cow disease, or BSE.) Even in the unlikely event that Badgers are the main cause of this outbreak, catch/vaccinate/release programmes have been found to be far more effective than culls anyway.

Happily, there are some people who have seen the industry for what it is – some very important people: dairy farmers themselves. There are pages devoted to documenting dairy farmers who have ‘seen the light’ and decided to go into a kinder business. These individuals are from all over the world – Ireland, The Netherlands, Iran and beyond. Each one of them has to struggle against a culture (no pun intended) that sees dairy farming as not doing much harm, and so brands them mad for giving it up. They have seen the look in the calf’s eyes as they sell him at market, pleading and scared. They have heard the cries that emanate from both mother and calf when they are forcibly separated, that sometimes go on for days. They have experienced cows going lame from lack of calcium brought on by intensive breeding and mastitis due to excessive milk production.

Cows are friends, not milk machines – Jo-Anne McArthur/We animals

Cows need grass – Jo-Anne McArthur/We animals

Perhaps Liz Truss should work on getting those EU subsidies diverted from propping up the meat and dairy industries and have them support kind businesses instead. Due to lack of demand through increasing lactose intolerance and increased awareness of health and welfare issues, dairy is a dying industry. Let’s breathe new life into farms, making them utopias of plant based food and wildflowers. Naive, me?

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