Animal Earth Human

Whenever an animal is being used for the purpose of making money for humans, exploitation, neglect, abuse and cruelty are likely experienced by those animals.  Investigate before you partake.

Somebody who commits an act of remarkable bravery or who has shown great courage, strength of character, or another admirable quality.

Easter Bunny Rescues Battery Hens

Friday, 6 April 2007, 2:43 pm

Open Rescue Collective

As a gesture of goodwill this Easter, the Easter Bunny, helped by animal rights activists from the Open Rescue Collective, broke into a South Auckland battery hen farm and rescued 10 battery hens from their cages.

 

Farm workers were left vegan Easter eggs and a Happy Easter card explaining the reasons for the rescue.

The Easter Bunny explains that while eggs are traditionally a symbol of new life, this symbol has been perverted as eggs laid by hens kept in battery cages are the product of a lifetime of suffering and deprivation.“The rescued battery hens have been placed into good homes and are enjoying grass, fresh air and sunshine for the first time in their lives” says Open Rescue spokesperson Deirdre Sims.

“We carried out this action to highlight the suffering of battery hens. Hens confined in battery cages are denied their most basic natural behaviours. They can’t even walk or stretch their wings.”

“This Easter, we urge the New Zealand public to follow the example of the Easter Bunny by refusing to support cruelty. Boycott caged eggs and help bring new life to battery hens.”

 

Hayden Panettier attempted to play real-life hero, teaming with the Save Japan Dolphins coalition in trying to disrupt the annual slaughter of dolphins by Japanese fisherman, who kill an estimated 23,000 of the sea creatures each year.

Despite international outcry, dolphin hunting is still considered culturally acceptable in parts of Japan, where many locals believe the mammals should be treated like fish.

The 18-year-old Heroes star on Tuesday joined activists from the U.S. and Australia in paddling out on surfboards to try and reach a pod of dolphins before it was driven into a nearby cove and massacred.

But before the well-intentioned surfers could reach the cetaceans, they were intercepted by a fishing boat intent on blocking their path.

Video footage of the confrontation shows the angry fisherman using the boat’s propellers to halt the surfers’ progress and even lashing out at them with a boat hook, eventually forcing them to return to shore.

“It was really frightening,” Panettiere said. “Some of us were hit by the boat hook. But in the end, all we really worried about was the dolphins.”

Growing emotional, the actress said they were close enough to the dolphins to see them “sky-hopping, jumping out of the water to see us.

“One little baby dolphin stuck his head out and kind of looked at me, and the thought that it’s no longer with us is really difficult to take,” she said, tears streaking down her face.

After returning to shore, Panettiere and her activist friends headed directly to Osaka and left the country to avoid being arrested for trespass by the Japanese national police.

Panettiere has since returned to Los Angeles.

eonline.com

Please make decisions not only for people, the planet and animals in nature but for animals in our society too.

All animals have culture. We communicate, have families, play and work.

Once you know the suffering endured by another for your shoe, your sweater, your dessert, your entertainment, what makes you continue using those products anyway?

By TOM HAYS, Associated Press Writer Sat Nov 24, 3:17 PM ET

NEW YORK - From her baptism in Liberia to Christmas years later in her adopted New York City, Mamie Manneh never lost the longing to celebrate religious rituals by eating monkey meat.

Now, the tribal customs of Manneh and other West African immigrants have become the focus of an unusual criminal case charging her with meat smuggling, and touching on issues of religious freedom, infectious diseases and wildlife preservation.

The case “appears to be the first of its kind relating to that uniquely African product,” defense attorney Jan Rostal wrote in a pending motion to dismiss. “Unfortunately, it represents the sort of clash of cultural and religious values inherent in the melting pot that is America.”

At the center of the case in federal court is a modest woman with nine children and a history of domestic discord.

The case dates to early 2006, when federal inspectors at JFK Airport examined a shipment of 12 cardboard boxes from Guinea.

They were addressed to Manneh and, according to a flight manifest, contained African dresses and smoked fish with a value of $780.

Instead, stashed underneath the smoked fish, the inspectors found what West Africans refer to as bushmeat: “skulls, limbs and torsos of non-human primate species” plus the hoof and leg of a small antelope, according to court papers.

Three days later, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agents were at Manneh’s door, where she told them she ran a smoked fish importing business.

According to the agents, she initially denied ordering any bushmeat from Africa or ever eating it while in the United States.

But after she consented to a search, the agents came across a tiny, hairy arm hidden in her garage.

“Monkey,” she explained, claiming the arm was sent to her out of the blue “as a gift from God in heaven.”

Federal prosecutors hit Manneh with smuggling charges that accused her of violating import procedures and suggested she was a menace to man and beast alike.

A criminal complaint cited evidence that the illegal importation of bushmeat encourages the slaughter of protected wild animals.

More ominously, the complaint warned of “the potential health risks to humans linking bushmeat to diseases like Lassa fever, Ebola, HIV, SARS and monkeypox.”

Defense attorney Rostal has countered by accusing the government of picking on a poorly educated immigrant.

Her client’s only offense, she said, was her inability to grasp Western attitudes and highly technical regulations regarding bushmeat.

Defense papers also argue that the U.S. demand for the meat involved in the Manneh case — from Africa’s green monkey population — is “too small to have any significance for conservation.”

Manneh, 39, testified last year that before arriving in the United States more than 25 years ago, monkey meat was critical to her religious upbringing.

At age 7, “I was baptized and they used that for the baptizing ceremony,” she told a judge.

Manneh is already serving a two-year sentence in state prison for trying to run over a woman she suspected of sleeping with her husband, Zanger Jefferson. If convicted of the federal charges she faces up to five more years in prison and deportation.

“The government’s taking a woman away from her children,” complained Jefferson, who’s struggling to raise the children alone. “It’s very depressing, especially with the holidays right around the corner.”

The prosecution also has dampened spirits at the church in Staten Island where Manneh and other African immigrants once packed the pews to practice a religion blending Christianity and tribal customs.

One of the few worshippers left, Leona Artis, says the congregation’s appetite for monkey meat is deeply misunderstood.

Take Thanksgiving.

“Where some people have turkey, we’ll have monkey meat,” Artis said. “I’ve been eating it all my life. It’s delicious.”

Baptisms, Easter, Christmas, weddings — all are occasions for eating monkey, Manneh’s supporters said in a sworn statement filed with the court.

The statement was vague about how the meat is obtained, but explains that it always arrives dried and smoked. Once blessed by a pastor, “we usually prepare it by cooking it for several hours into a stew,” they said.

For them, the exotic import is more than just food.

“We eat bushmeat,” they said, “for our souls.”

I think one of the many reasons humans allow themselves to hurt animals the way we do has to do with how animals show pain. We don’t hear or see or recognize their misery as we might a humans’ and so more easily remain in denial. Grocery stores help too.