In response to ag gag laws which criminalize undercover photo and video from being taken in factory farms, animal rights activist Will Potter launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to buy drones to legally photograph factory farms from above:   “In my new project, I am going to use new investigative journalism tools to help expose what some corporations want to keep hidden.”

Agribusiness is moving mountains to stopping animal cruelty inherent in factory farming from being exposed, but Will Potter is staying one step ahead.  While the drones might not capture cruelty, they will show the destructive impact that factory farms have on the environment.  To learn more about and support his effort, please visit his Kickstarter page, Drone on the Farm: An Aerial Exposé

A letter from PETA has prompted tennis star Andy Murray from removing references to hunting from his hotel’s website.  Here’s an excerpt: “The idea of hunting cats and dogs, such as your beloved Maggie May and Rusty, would rightly make most of us sick, and yet the animals listed on the Cromlix website have exactly the same capacity to feel pain and suffer.”

Andy Murray’s Hotel Cromlix in Scotland

Hunting is the only “sport” in which only one team knows that it’s playing.  One could argue that eating meat from free roaming animals who are hunted is more humane than eating factory farmed animals, but I can’t help but think that the majority of people who hunt do so because they enjoy killing.  And, while it’s true that the hunted animals lived freely before being killed, they often leave behind offspring who are too young to take care of themselves.  To the humans, hunting is a recreational activity, but to the the animals who are killed and orphaned, it’s a tragedy.  To learn more about hunting and to see what you can do to stop it, please visit PETA’s hunting page.

In a thorough story about the pork industry’s slow phase out of gestation crates, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports on many aspects of the change, including the vast financial resources of large companies like Cargill, Smithfield Foods and Hormel  that will enable them to make the switch from crates to group pens; the concern among small contract farmers that the added expense won’t translate into added revenue; the risks and benefits of having pigs in group pens; and the growing demand from the public to eliminate the most intensive forms of confinement.  According to the National Pork Producers Association, about 20 percent of U.S. sows are in group sow housing; the rest are kept in crates.  “Gestation stalls became common in the 1970s and early 1980s, as hog producers got bigger and moved their animals indoors. The stalls generally measure 2 feet by 7 feet.  Canada recently banned the continuous housing of sows in gestation crates, following the European Union.” Dallas Hockman, industry relations VP at the National Pork Producers Council, defends the intensive confinement of sows, stating, “It’s not about right or wrong, it’s about choice. The type of housing does not dictate animal welfare.”

Gestation Crates

Thanks to undercover footage taken in concentrated animal feeding operations (aka factory farms), consumers largely oppose the intense confinement of the animals who they eat.  Of course, animal rights activists oppose it too.  The challenge we face as a community is whether or not we advocate for incremental reform, such as the change from crates to shared pens, or to push for the only humane option, which is the abolition of all forms of animal farming and slaughter.  Shared pens might be better, but they are still cruel, as they deprive the pigs from the opportunity to roam freely in the outdoors.   And the shift to pens from crates doesn’t change the fact that the piglets have their tails sliced off without anesthesia and that sick piglets are killed by slamming them against the floor. While we might disagree on strategy, we can agree on our message when consumers are listening — the eating animals in modern day times is inherently inhumane.

Morrissey, the former frontman for the Smiths and animal rights activist, has released a song entitled, “The Bullfighter Dies.”  Here are the relevant lyrics:  “Mad in Madrid / Ill in Seville / Lonely in Barcelona / Then someone told you and you cheered / You cheered ‘Hooray! Hooray! the bullfighter dies / And nobody cries / Because we all want the bull to survive.“

Who would believe that, in 2014, thousands of people gather in arenas in Mexico, Spain, France and Portugal and pay money to to watch men stab bulls to death?  It’s so egregious and archaic.  How can anybody possibly route for the bullfighter?  To learn more about bullfighting and find out what you can do to help, please visit PETA’s webpage entitled Bullfighting: A Tradition of Tragedy

According to the NY Times, a city in southern China is “trying to lower the profile of its much-criticized dog-eating festival. The feasting is expected to go ahead as scheduled this weekend, but local officials have taken steps to deflect outside attention from the annual event, at which thousands of dogs are consumed.”  The article goes on to say that, “the dog meat trade has become a key target for Chinese animal rights advocates. In 2011, a group blocked a truck transporting nearly 500 dogs to a slaughterhouse and paid $18,000 to free them.”

Photo: China Network/Reuters

This NY Times article provides us with a hook to ask our dog-loving, meat eating friends why we should be any more disturbed by people eating dogs instead of pigs, cows and chickens.  As Mercy For Animals asks in its  campaign, “Why love one and eat the other?”  That said, ending or compromising any animal eating event is a victory, especially for the victims.