Legislation aims to end abhorrent animal crates

If you learned of places where people are confined to crates for most of their lives, what would you say (after your first yelp of disbelief and indignation)?

“OMG, people are sentient beings, and they’re ‘able to perceive and feel things’ – that’s horrible to do to them, and it must stop!”   

Well, the very same thing happens to some animals, who are equally sentient beings –mother pigs and baby calves, to be specific.  They are well aware of their confinement, and they are suffering  pain, discomfort and depression . . .  indefinitely.

If that’s not a life you’d wish on humans, why are you allowing it to happen to innocent animals?

Mother pigs can be confined in “gestation crates” after they’re artificially inseminated to live out their pregnancies, unable to turn around or lie down or, after about 16 weeks, mother their babies.  Does that sound sufficiently barbaric?

Calves can be confined to so-called “veal crates,” cruelly named for the end-product those calves will become after their short lives.  Unable to move around or play or experience real calf life, these babies live only to be slaughtered and turned into food for people who rave over their muscle-free tenderness.

Does that sound sufficiently barbaric?

APLNJ & Coalition

The Animal Protection League of New Jersey (APLNJ.org), a member of the New Jersey Gestation Crate Ban Coalition, shares an alert and helpful tips about current state legislation: 

A5236/S3401 would ban cruel gestation and veal crates in New Jersey and allow mother pigs and baby calves enough space to turn around freely, lie down, stand up and fully extend their limbs.

Ten U.S. states, Canada and the European Union have outlawed this abuse.  It's time for New Jersey to take a stand and take action.

Please phone your Senator and two Assembly members and ask them to cosponsor and support A5236/S3401 to ban gestation and veal crates.

Sample phone call script:   "As your constituent, I am calling to ask you to please cosponsor and support A5236/S3401 to ban cruel caging of farm animals in New Jersey."

After making your call, please send a follow-up message.

Sample email letter:  Subject line: A note from your constituent - please support A5236/S3401 to ban gestation and veal crates in New Jersey

Dear Legislator,

As your constituent, I strongly encourage you to cosponsor and support A5236/S3401, which would ban gestation and veal crates within our state.  Gestation crates virtually immobilize mother pigs for nearly their entire lives.  The crates are so small mother pigs can't even turn around or take more than a step forward or backward.  Because of this lack of movement, they suffer muscle and bone deterioration that often leads to debilitating injuries.

Veal crates are similarly cruel.  Within days or even hours of birth, calves raised for veal are taken away from their mothers and locked in these crates, which are so tiny the animals can barely move.

Please stand against animal abuse and prohibit the cruel practice of immobilizing mother pigs and baby calves in New Jersey by cosponsoring and supporting A5236/S3401.

Thank you for your consideration. / Sincerely, . . .

 Squirrels redux

We looked in vain for squirrels during recent snow storms, wondering what was up.  An area “amateur” naturalist commented: Squirrels’ tails are like blankets, and they will hole up in cozy dens in hollow trees or abandoned woodpecker nests. 

Any animal active in the winter is probably living on some body fat, but squirrels [also] store a lot of food. They can smell buried nuts even through a foot of snow, and will tunnel under the snow if they get a good whiff.

“It’s all about food,” she said, and sure enough: once we could get outside again with “squirrel snacks,” our neighborhood pals reappeared.

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To the oceans for a welcome change of venue

Snow: hissss!

Enough of this terrestrial world – including too much snow and ice and . . . winter! -- for awhile.  Let’s go to sea!

There’s news about jellyfish, sharks, rays and whales, horseshoe crabs and sea turtles.  It’s not all good news, to be sure, but for a while, we’ll escape our deepening snowscape.

Jellies have the moves

Jellyfish move like, well, jellyfish, loosely blobbing around – which could make you wonder how they get anywhere.  Now we know how one variety of jellyfish propel themselves: they create a temporary water wall to push off from, thereby getting ahead.

Jellyfish work with rotating vortices meeting from different directions to make water briefly stationary – a wall, in effect.    https://tinyurl.com/3z9ndyv3

 Sharks & rays in decline

             Mako shark                        Metcalfe-Getty

Sharks: long feared and even mythologized . . . but now facing possible extinction largely because of overfishing around the world.  So-called “incidental” catches also drive their numbers down.

Populations of both sharks and rays have declined 71% since 1970 (just 50 years ago!).  There are ways to avoid catching sharks and to release them safely, but the profit motive causes some people to ignore them.

To head off extinction of sharks and rays, governments are urged to set science-based limits on how many of them can be caught and kept. International cooperation would be necessary because both creatures range across the open ocean.     https://tinyurl.com/15yt9sxo

Secret lives of blue whales

Weighing up to 380,000 pounds and stretching some 100 feet in length, blue whales are the largest creatures ever to have lived on Earth.  They’re hardly inconspicuous  . . . and yet “a previously unknown population of the leviathans has long been lurking in the Indian Ocean.”

Which leads to an assumption about that ocean’s capacity!  It makes up nearly 20% of the global ocean and it’s the warmest and third largest of five world oceans, after the Pacific and Atlantic, and before the Southern and Arctic Oceans. 

                                      Blue whale                                              

This “covert cadre” of whales has its own signature sound distinct from any other whale song ever described.  Just think: with its language now recorded and analyzed, its existence and location are no longer in doubt.    https://tinyurl.com/8yyswbjb

Horseshoe crabs ‘for the birds’

Like so many other animals, horseshoe crabs “have long been harvested for human use,” despite their ancient pedigree and their importance to shore birds and fish.  It’s the way of the world, alas, and it’s the reason a fight for their survival is now underway. 

A recent Times of Trenton story reviewed horseshoe crabs’ value to people.  It started with their use as fertilizer and livestock feed before they were used as “prized bait for eel and whelk fisheries”. . . .  From  prehistoric survivor to such a fate: what a comedown.  

Horseshoe crab

Then came their use – still current in the US – as drug testers.  Horseshoe crabs’  blue blood is part of a compound for testing the purity of drugs.  The good news: a synthetic replacement is catching on in Europe and may ultimately become the test of choice here too.

In the most natural application, horseshoe crab eggs deposited on Delaware Bay beaches feed and nourish fish and migrating birds.  The crabs have become major contributors to the Delaware Bay ecosystem.  https://tinyurl.com/osty82qo

Rescuing sea turtles

“An apocalypse of turtles on the beach” was how one man described the myriad sea turtles desperately needing help (a.k.a. warmth) off the coast of Texas, a state suffering its own crisis of extreme cold made worse by loss of power.  The few turtles first spotted, and rescued, quickly grew to thousands of them.   

      Green sea turtle          

In winter weather, the chilling shallow water zaps strength from the coldblooded green sea turtles, a threatened species.  Although rescuing cold-stunned turtles is a regular event, this year’s weather caused much greater hardship, the Washington Post reported.   

Numerous volunteers pitched in, at least one in a kayak and others who waded into the frigid water for turtles – many of whom are recovering at a nearby air base.  The Dodo reported on other turtle rescue efforts: https://www.thedodo.com/daily-dodo/people-are-filling-their-cars-with-sea-turtles-to-save-them-texas-freeze

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Roll back the bad stuff & help end pandemics

They don’t have to run errands, cook, clean or fret over PC problems, but most animals have one big, all-important job: staying alive.  Oh, sure, we may worry about getting Covid-19 vaccine and try to avoid other health hazards . . . but we’re not actively fleeing poachers and hunters aiming to kill us or being live-captured for “wet markets” or seeing our habitats being “developed” right out of existence.  

Over the last four years, our federal government has done colossal harm to birds and wildlife with “a Migratory Bird Treaty Act that no longer protects birds, a watered-down Endangered Species Act, and a policy that allows hunters in Alaska to crawl into bear and wolf dens to shoot mothers and their babies.” 

And those are only some of the worst offenses of the former administration. Estimates vary for how long it will take the current administration to restore wildlife protections in America. This Washington Post article details further egregious attempts to cut back on animal welfare. 
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/12/22/biden-wildlife-protections-trump/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F2dc9411%2F5fe21f279d2fda0efb90c282%2F5b2db69bae7e8a6f6d31c7c9%2F56%2F68%2F5fe21f279d2fda0efb90c282  

Of course, that’s not all, either.  There’s the matter of the infamous border wall partially erected during the last four years, every day destroying more animal habitat for hundreds of now-ugly miles along the US-Mexican border.  This ego-trip-wall has caused all sorts of destruction along its path.

The only good news we’ve heard about it so far is that further construction will stop.  But that step can’t bring back wildlife habitat, nor can it rid the area of people installing sensors, lighting and other surveillance technologies, and maintaining the 30-foot high barrier.

Endangered jaguars are among the animals to lose habitat because crews have dug and blasted their way through mountainous terrain, leaving gouged-out sections that will remain unfinished – and as one person observed, “You can never un-dynamite a mountain and piece back together wilderness that has been blown apart.”  Check out this link.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/12/02/biden-border-wall-trump/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F2d3ac25%2F5fc7c2cf9d2fda0efb7bd4ac%2F5b2db69bae7e8a6f6d31c7c9%2F57%2F68%2F5fc7c2cf9d2fda0efb7bd4ac

Back to Covid-19

Yes, coronavirus hospitalization and death numbers are coming down, and yes, the vaccines offer hope for an eventual escape from this horror.  But, as often indicated, other such horrors will continue to happen and spread and kill.  

                    Chinese wet market             Alamy pic

Since this plague seems to have been traced back to a notorious wet market in Wuhan, China, one of many such places in the world where live wildlife is sold for human consumption, the great risk of another such pandemic continues.  

The Humane Society of the US (HSUS) has spoken out in favor of protecting wildlife and public health alike by passing an “important bill that will ban the import, export and sale for human consumption of certain live wildlife in the U.S. and will bolster resources to end the trade globally and eliminate wildlife trafficking.” 

The bill that we and our legislators should support – early and often! -- is H.R. 151 and S. 37, the “Preventing Future Pandemics Act,” because “Despite the immense cruelty and inherent spread of disease, wildlife markets continue to operate around the world.” 

As this “deadly coronavirus continues to devastate the globe, it is more important now than ever to address the dire public health threats posed by the sale and trade of live wildlife.  Innocent wild animals and the American public deserve better,” the HSUS argues.

            Selling grilled rats in Indonesia            Getty image

And we agree!  So, please, readers, urge your Congressional representatives and senators to support H. R. 151 and S. 37.  Now!

Good news (so far)

I’ve referred to the growing pet (and people) food-insecurity and home-insecurity I’ve read about, assuming it’s happening here too.  Well, maybe not yet, anyway.  A local shelter manager says it really hasn’t hit there (yet?) and a statewide animal advocacy organization reports the same.  So there’s time to plan how to help when the time comes . . . !   

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Amazing animals abound around the world

Mallard

Walking around a lake on a cold, windy day, you’re bundled up and comfortable enough – but those crazy ducks in the water are diving below the surface, practically doing hand-stands, then paddling around as if it were a summer afternoon.  When a few of them head for the bank, you think they’re finally getting smart, but they just bob in the shallows for a while before heading back out to the middle.

Crazy ducks?  Not really.  They’re ducks, not humans, and ducks don’t react to  cold winter water the way we do.  Assuming they’d behave as we would is called anthropomorphism, or “the attribution of human characteristics, emotions, and behaviors to animals or other non-human things (including objects, plants, and supernatural beings).”

That means right now during the nor’easter battering us with snow and wind gusts, I shouldn’t be worrying about how squirrels and birds deal with such weather.  Unlike me, they don’t need to be inside, looking out.  (Right?  I do hope they’re OK, with living quarters so much more exposed to the elements.)

A day like this, happily home-bound, allows lounging, reading and thinking about animals I’ve encountered recently . . .

·       *     The raccoon who squatted on our deck table earlier this winter, happily eating all the snacks left there for squirrels and birds.  S/he looked ginormous as I peeked through the blinds to see what Harry had been so agitated about.  The overhead light prompted the freeloader to move on, and since then I haven’t been so generous with treats there.

A naturalist friend told me later that raccoons are omnivores and will eat almost anything. They don't hibernate, but if it gets extremely cold for a few days in a row, they may hole up in their dens (usually a hollow tree), but they may use a cave, or "borrow" another animal's burrow.

Najin & Fatu, the last 2                     NYT pic      

*     Northern white rhinos on the brink of extinction.  A mother and daughter, Najin and Fatu (“Say their names!”), live a heavily guarded life in Kenya because they are the last of their kind, and when they go, that is the end.  Peaceful creatures who “once flourished across Asia and North America, Africa and Europe,” they have been reduced to this state by human hunting and habitat loss. 

Wanting to “understand what we are destroying,” Sam Anderson visited the two rhinos and wrote about them in “A Mother and Daughter at the End.”  It’s very sad.  https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/magazine/the-last-two-northern-white-rhinos-on-earth.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article

*     The platypus, a most unusual mammal, native to Australia.  “What other animal has a rubbery bill, ankle spikes full of venom, luxurious fur that glows under black light and a tendency to lay eggs?”  I first encountered the creature in a Patrick O’Brian maritime novel whose hero is (excruciatingly) stung by a male platypus’s poisonous spur. 

 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/science/platypus-genome-echidna.html?campaign_id=34&emc=edit_sc_20210112&instance_id=25911&nl=science-times&regi_id=20760274&segment_id=49049&te=1&user_id=a360dad7b26df61ea65737080d3deedd

*     The African crested rat: the world’s only known toxic rodent.  Kinda cute, maybe, but deadly, this creature nibbles from a poison arrow tree, then spits chunks back out onto his   fur.  It’s poisonous enough “to bring an elephant to its knees,” and curious dogs who survive go to pains to avoid the rat.  https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/25/science/african-crested-rat-poison.html?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20201126&instance_id=24498&nl=the-morning&regi_id=20760274&segmen

     

Harry 

*   Cat & his mats, much closer to home!  I’ve already mentioned our Harry and his mats and my frustration.  Now, though, I'm happy to report that he and they were taken care of, beautifully, at his vet’s, where he was brushed, combed, bathed and de-matted (at least for now).  And he came home loving himself!

This article in Catster cheered me up about “cat mats,” by reinforcing some of what I’ve learned lately. https://www.catster.com/cat-grooming/winter-cat-grooming-tips-to-help-kitty-through-the-cold-dry-months   

Give your pet(s) an extra hug and enjoy the snow!

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What animals are you meeting up with?  Tell us at1moreonce.blogspot.com