Animal Rights

02/10/2007
Air Canada has stopped shipments of beagles for medical research to Europe after protests from its passengers.

Beagles have been shipped from Montreal to Paris by Air Canada for many years. Last spring this company was carrying out one of these routinary shipments when the passengers travelling on that flight were able to hear the dogs yelping (since nonhuman animals who are transported by plane travel in dreadful conditions, one can well imagine they had reasons be howling). Passengers were shocked about this, and their upset grew when they later saw these animals were unloaded from the plane when they got to Paris. After knowing that they were going to be used in laboratories, they protested about this, claiming that Air Canada should not be involved in any activity of the kind.

Spokepersons of Air Canada commented that the company was surprised about the complaints, pointing out that it was the first time something like this has happened. It seems that so far passengers had not been aware of kind of the cargo the company was conveying. Now, as a result of the complaints, Air Canada has decided to stop the transport of beagles from Montreal to Paris (since it has a policy of stopping any shipment if it disturbs passengers).

The company which sends this animals to France is Marshall BioResources which, breeds other nonhuman animals such as mongrel dogs, ferrets and “mini-pigs” for animal experimentation. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency has pointed out that Marshall has all the legal authorizations that are needed in order to transport the beagles, since the kennel where they are bred satisfy the required stipulations and the animals have passed the health requirements. So there is no legal restriction to such a commercial activity. These is not surprising at all, given that nonhuman animals are considered resources available for us to use.

Air Canada’s decision does not mean in itself a real change for nonhuman animals. In fact, the permit that Marshall had to ship animals from Montreal has been reassigned, and Marshall is now apparently sending the animals from Toronto. Moreover: even if no other company starts transporting the beagles from Canada to Europe, in as much as there is a demand for experiments on animals, either from private companies or from public administrations, their use as laboratoty tools will go on. Even if Marshall did not send the animals, others would raise them and send them: others providers would soon appear, we can be sure about that.

However, this piece of news is interesting for another reason. Cases such as these, in which the public becomes aware of what happens to those nonhuman animals who are exploited are exceptional. And it is significant that when they occur they provoke such a positive reaction. It is in fact very likely that those who travelled from Montreal to Paris that day will see from now the use of nonhuman animals in another light. Of course they knew before that nonhumans were used, but surely most (if not all) of them had never reflected before in any depth whether this was something justified. This shows how much work we still have to do in order to reach the people, in order to help them think of what they hadn’t thought before. There are lots of potential veg(etari)ans and antispeciesists who just go on with their lives using nonhuman animals simply because they haven’t been faced with the arguments in favor of a different lifestyle and the evidence of the harm humans systematically inflict on nonhumans.

03/10/2007

After a group of cows on a farm in the village of Wanborough close to Guildford, Surrey were found to be suffering from Foot and Mouth disease (seemingly due to a leaking pipe at a laboratory authorised by the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs –Defra), the epidemic of 2001 ahs been during the last months in everyone’s minds. Back then millions of animals were killed in order to stop the disease from being spread.

In fact, slaughters such as the one which took place six years ago are due merely to economic reasons. Only one out of three or four thousand among those who were slayed in 2001 were infected. What is more, most of the animals who actually had the disease would have recovered from it. Those animals who are infected may suffer significant weight loss, and they may not recover for several months. However, foot and mouth disease is rarely fatal. Their killing, for being burned afterwards in horrific pires is another example of the fact that when human and nonhuman interests clash, the former always prevail in our society, even when the latter are significant, as it is the case now.

03/10/2007
The Sierra Club and other environmental groups have claimed that the number of geese should be reduced (that is, that many of them should be killed) in the Canadian Anacostia Park. The reason for this massacre would be to make it easier that some plants that they eat reproduce better.

Stephen Syphax, National Park Service Supervisory Resource Management Specialist, defended that the birds be “euthanized and prepared properly for human consumption”. This is certainly a misuse of the term euthanasia, since they are not in agony or in agonising pain without possible cure, but rather being killed.

Another similar piece of news has to do with massive killings of free animals in Northamerica.

In Yellowstone wolves have been extinct a long time ago. After this, they were deliberately reintroduced by humans. This of course was not done out of any concern for nonhuman animals, on the contrary, the reason was no other than reestablishing some environmental conditions that had been altered as a result of the previous killing of all the preexisting wolves. Moreover: one of the main interests in reintroducing the wolves was to kill elks, since they were one of the reasons why certain trees were not thriving as before the wolves were made extinct.

Now the US Government has decided to implement a measure in contradiction to this and to kill more than half of the wolves which live in the area where Yellowstone is. Around 700 of these animals could then be slaughtered.

This news is particularly infuriating given that in an case such as this humans have been actually that these animals reproduce in a certain area only to kill them after a while.

05/10/2007
The European Union have shown that the UK is the country in which more experiments have been carried out in Europe in 2006, with a total of 3,010,000 procedures. Second comes Germany with 2,412,678 and third France with 2,325,398.

The argument which has been used to justify this has been that there are no alternative methods. Of course this is speciesist. Consider that experimentation on humans would surely be rather more useful than animal experimentation, yet no ones suggests its implementation, regardless of whether there are alternative methods or not, because that would harm humans in an unacceptable way. This seems very correct that this should be the case indeed. But if a similar attitude is not held when it comes to other animals, then that means that the interests of the latter are not being properly considered. In other words: that they are being discriminated against. Apart from this, it is significant that the fact is that the funds to finance the development of so-called alternative methods have not being increased either. The conclusion to be drawn is a rather straightforward one: there is simply no real will to reduce the harm nonhuman animals are undergoing in laboratories. Their interests are being counted for nothing.

Despite promises from politicians, animal experimentation has not been reduced in the United Kingdom. On the contrary, they have risen to reach a peak. In fact, during this period, the former prime minister even expressed publicly his support for animal experimentation, as a response against strategies using violence, given that most of the public (potential voters) reject such strategies. This has been unfortunate, since many of those who oppose these strategies have been driven to reject animal rights ideas. Note that it’s not necessary that the rejection of a strategy comes initially together with the rejection of the goal which the violence is attempting to further.