Wool Is not Kind By Sharon L. Wallenberg

Wool grows on sheep, like hair on humans, or fur on dogs.  Most wool comes from Australia.  It is a big business and like anything else – there are winners and losers.  The winners are the corporations, and the big losers are the sheep.  Australia’s largest live sheep exporter, Emanuel Exports, recently had its license revoked after a whistle blower revealed the horrific truth about live export.                        

For decades, hundreds of thousands of sheep no longer considered profitable for wool production, have been shipped alive from Australia to the Middle East for slaughter.  More than 100,000 liters of urine and feces accumulates on a typical live export ship every day during the weeks that the sheep are on board.  The ship won’t be ‘washed out’ until after they disembark.  Any sheep who needs to lie down from exhaustion risks being buried alive in excrement.  There is no food or water for the animals, and as temperatures soar, the heat literally cooks sheep to death.  The sheep who survive will continue to suffer surrounded by the bodies of their dead companions.

Heavily pregnant ewes are shipped for slaughter like every other animal.  They will endure the trauma of live export while going into labor and giving birth.  Babies born on live export ships will lose their mothers, be trampled, or be killed by distressed crew members who are routinely ordered to slit the babies’ throats.  Weeks later, when they arrive in the Middle East, those individuals remaining alive will be slaughtered in the most horrific ways imaginable.  All this is after enduring a lifetime of suffering.

Sheep raised for wool suffer.  Shearers are paid by weight, not time.  It does not matter to them if an ear, breast, or testicle is sheared off.  The docile sheep are hit, beaten, and cursed at while being sheared.  If an animal does not survive being sheared, it is cooked and eaten in full view of the surviving sheep.   They know exactly what is happening, and that they could be next.  No medical attention is ever provided, even for the most serious conditions.

You can help stop this horrific abuse of sentient individuals – don’t buy wool.

There Are No "Good Eggs" By Sharon L. Wallenberg

 

THERE ARE NO “GOOD” EGGS

Cage-free, free-range, and organic are marketing terms used to sell eggs to consumers who erroneously believe that these eggs are guilt free.  Nothing could be further from the truth. 

Hens lay eggs.  The male chicks are treated by the organic, cage-free, free-range, and conventional egg industry as garbage.  These unwanted, unprofitable, vulnerable individuals are murdered, often hours after birth, by suffocation in large garbage bags, or are pulverized in machines designed to grind them up. 

While the male chicks are murdered soon after birth, the female chicks are mutilated by being de-beaked.  The sensitive beak, comparable to the human finger tip, is removed to prevent the babies from committing suicide by pecking itself to death, and thus eliminating profits.

These individuals have done nothing wrong to deserve this.  They are only guilty of being unprofitable.  In nature, Mother Hens keep all their babies – boys and girls – safe under their wings until they are old enough to venture out alone.

Cage Free facilities often house several thousand birds in a single building.  They cannot walk around, fly, groom themselves, or engage in any natural behavior.  They live in feces and urine, and breath ammonia not air.  But they are ‘cage free’.

Free range is no better.  These caring, affectionate, intelligent beings are not protected by any laws or regulations defining ‘free range’.  Free range is anything the profit driven producer wants it to be.  This is a marketing term used to sell products to uninformed consumers, not a way to treat the hens better.

Organic only refers to the food the birds eat.  All other horrific circumstances of their short horrific lives, and inhumane slaughter are the same.  Organic is about profit, not compassion.

In nature, hens produce approximately ten eggs a year, and only during the breeding season.  Commercial egg laying hens are forced to produce up to 300 eggs a year.  This is done by forcing a ‘moult’, or starving the hens into a new cycle in their bodies. 

Eggs are the hen’s menstrual cycle.  This often results in eggs being trapped in their bodies.  Since there is never any Veterinary help for these animals, the eggs are ‘cooked’ in their bodies.  This causes the hens to perish in a horrible and painful death.

Hens usually live 10 to 15 years in nature.  In the egg industry the hens live 12 to 18 months before their bodies give out.  

Hens are sentient beings not protected by the ‘Human Slaughter Law’.  Those very limited protections are reserved for mammals - animals, who like humans, produce milk for their young.  This restriction exists because humans can ‘relate’ to mammals more than hens.  

Lessons Learned in 2020 and Going Forward in 2021 By Sharon L. Wallenberg, Founder Vegan International

The UN Climate Ambition Summit, (Dec. 12, 2020), the UN General Assembly 31^st Special Session – In Response To the Coronavirus Disease Covid-19 Pandemic (Dec. 4, 2020), and UN Summit on Biodiversity (Sept. 30, 2020), had one thing in common – THEY ALL MISSED THE POINT!

No one can argue with the ideas discussed in the Climate Ambition Summit, five years after the Paris Agreement.  Coal consumption needs to be cut, dependence on fossil fuel needs to end, solar, wind, and hydro energy need to be promoted.  BUT THE SINGLE GREATEST CONTRIBUTOR TO CLIMATE CHANGE, METHANE FROM ANIMALS RAISED TO BE EATEN BY HUMANS, WAS NOT EVEN MENTIONED.

The United Nations General Assembly 31^st Special Session – In Response to the Coronavirus Disease Covid-19 Pandemic discussed a plethora of ideas.  These included the disproportionate adverse effect on women and girls being victimized by violence from frustrated men.  There are currently 2.5 million more child marriages, and a high rate of death from childbirth in girls 15 to 19 years old.  Eleven million girls are at risk of not going back to school after the pandemic.  Violence against children 2 to 17 years old is up to one billion.  Hundreds of millions of children have been out of school.  Refugees, displaced persons, migrant workers, and the countries that host them, are particularly vulnerable.  The poorest countries are the most impacted. 

Worldwide there were eight million people in hunger increasing to135 million in the last four years.  This has now spiked to 270 million people starving during the Covid pandemic.  Efforts to provide clean water, nutrition and health care in developing nations have been seriously affected.  The pandemic has exacerbated efforts to combat other lethal diseases including malaria and measles.  The poorest countries are the most impacted.  The crisis is especially difficult in Small Island Developing States (SIDS) whose economies depend primarily on tourism.  235 million people may not survive 2021. 

Vaccines are currently available, but there is not enough money to purchase all the vaccines needed worldwide.  There are no vaccine distribution mechanisms in developing nations.  UNICEF, WHO, and GAVI will attempt to finance and distribute vaccines in remote areas.  The maxim: ‘No one is safe until everyone is safe’, needs to be embraced.

Only once during the Special Session was the actual cause of the pandemic referred to: ‘Wet markets should be closed.’  Only one speaker, Pavan Sukhdev, from United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), referred to the inability to live in harmony with nature, and habitat destruction, in relation to pandemic disease.  Ten percent of the Earth’s forests have been lost, causing closer interaction between humans and other species.  Habitat destruction and species extinction makes transmission of disease more likely to happen.  High biodiversity reduces the risk of zoonotic disease by the ‘Dilution Effect’, protecting human health.  Mr. Sukhdev said further that chemical farming is destroying soil, and referred to natural farming (also known as Veganic Agriculture) which produces higher yields at lower costs, without risk of the disease producing contaminants Escherichia coli, Salmonella, and others from animal exploitation.  THE CURRENT GLOBAL HEALTH AND ECONOMIC CRISIS IS CAUSED BY THE EXPLOITATION OF VOICELESS, RIGHTLESS SPECIES BY THE HUMAN SPECIES.

The United Nations Summit on Biodiversity stressed urgent action on biodiversity for sustainable development.  The summit provided a “Voices For Nature” platform, and highlighted the goal of “Living in Harmony with Nature”.  Biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation are currently among the top threats facing humanity - jeopardizing food security, water supplies, weakening human ability to fight diseases, causing extreme weather events, and exacerbating geopolitical tensions and conflicts.  ACCORDING TO THE SUMMIT, THE EMERGENCE OF DEADLY ZOONOTIC DISEASES SUCH AS HIV/AIDS, EBOLA, AND COVID 19 ARE A CONSEQUENCE OF HUMAN IMBALANCE WITH NATURE.  SPECIFICALLY, THE EXPLOITAITON OF OTHER SPECIES BY HUMANS.  

The fundamental issue is very simple.  It is Speciesism – the exploitation by one species - humans, of all other species.  The results of speciesism are destroying the planet: climate change, pandemics, human mortality and morbidity, species extinction, loss of biodiversity, pollution of air, water, and land, and misuse of scarce resources, among others.  MOST IMPORTANTLY, THIS IS A JUSTICE ISSUE AND A LEGAL ISSUE: THE LACK OF RIGHTS OF EXPLOITED, VOICELESS INDIVIDUALS.

Currently there are enforceable non-human rights in the Constitution of Ecuador.  ‘Rights for Nature’ does not treat nature as property under the law, it acknowledges that nature in all its life forms has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, and that people have the legal authority to enforce these rights on behalf of ecosystems.  This shining example needs to include all species, be accepted, and implemented everywhere.

In the words of Nobel Literature Prize Winner, Isaac Bashevis Singer, “How much longer, God, will you look on this inferno of yours and keep silent?  What need have you of this ocean of blood and flesh whose stench spreads across your universe?  Have you created this boundless slaughterhouse merely to show us your power and wisdom?”…“What do they know – all these scholars, all these philosophers, all the leaders of the world – about such as you?  They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation.  All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated.  …for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.”

“THOU SHALT NOT KILL” APPLIES TO ALL OF GOD’S CREATION, NOT ONLY HUMANS.”

 

Animals, My Brethren By Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz

 The following pages were written in the Concentration Camp Dachau, in the midst of all kinds of cruelties. They were furtively scrawled in a hospital barrack where I stayed during my illness, in a time when Death grasped day by day after us, when we lost twelve thousand within four and a half months.

Dear Friend:

You asked me why I do not eat meat and you are wondering at the reasons of my behavior. Perhaps you think I took a vow — some kind of penitence — denying me all the glorious pleasures of eating meat. You remember juicy steaks, succulent fishes, wonderfully tasted sauces, deliciously smoked ham and thousand wonders prepared out of meat, charming thousands of human palates; certainly you will remember the delicacy of roasted chicken. Now, you see, I am refusing all these pleasures and you think that only penitence, or a solemn vow, a great sacrifice could deny me that manner of enjoying life, induce me to endure a great resignment.

You look astonished, you ask the question: “But why and what for?” And you are wondering that you nearly guessed the very reason. But if I am, now, trying to explain you the very reason in one concise sentence, you will be astonished once more how far your guessing had been from my real motive. Listen to what I have to tell you:

I refuse to eat animals because I cannot nourish myself by the sufferings and by the death of other creatures. I refuse to do so, because I suffered so painfully myself that I can feel the pains of others by recalling my own sufferings.

 I feel happy, nobody persecutes me; why should I persecute other beings or cause them to be persecuted?

 I feel happy, I am no prisoner, I am free; why should I cause other creatures to be made prisoners and thrown into jail?

 I feel happy, nobody harms me; why should I harm other creatures or have them harmed?

 I feel happy, nobody wounds me; nobody kills me; why should I wound or kill other creatures or cause them to be wounded or killed for my pleasure and convenience?

 Is it not only too natural that I do not inflict on other creatures the same thing which, I hope and fear, will never be inflicted on me? Would it not be most unfair to do such things for no other purpose than for enjoying a trifling physical pleasure at the expense of others’ sufferings, others’ deaths?

These creatures are smaller and more helpless than I am, but can you imagine a reasonable man of noble feelings who would like to base on such a difference a claim or right to abuse the weakness and the smallness of others? Don’t you think that it is just the bigger, the stronger, the superior’s duty to protect the weaker creatures instead of persecuting them, instead of killing them? “Noblesse oblige.” I want to act in a noble way.

I recall the horrible epoch of inquisition and I am sorry to state that the time of tribunals for heretics has not yet passed by, that day by day, men use to cook in boiling water other creatures which are helplessly given in the hands of their torturers. I am horrified by the idea that such men are civilized people, no rough barbarians, no natives. But in spite of all, they are only primitively civilized, primitively adapted to their cultural environment. The average European, flowing over with highbrow ideas and beautiful speeches, commits all kinds of cruelties, smilingly, not because he is compelled to do so, but because he wants to do so. Not because he lacks the faculty to reflect upon and to realize all the dreadful things they are performing. Oh no! Only because they do not want to see the facts. Otherwise they would be troubled and worried in their pleasures.

 

'The Fifth Commandment' By Sharon L. Wallenberg

The Fifth Commandment of God is THOU SHALT NOT KILL.  God gave the Ten Commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai after the Israelites were released from captivity and slavery in Egypt.  God had just shown His might in the parting of the Red Sea, the single greatest miracle in the history of planet Earth.  Evidence of this miracle was in a deep channel through the Red Sea where the remains of the Egyptians’ chariots were found, and reported in the New York Times, as well as other reputable news outlets.

Soon after the God’s greatest miracle, God called Moses to Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments.  This Covenant between God and people is recorded in the Bible in Exodus and Deuteronomy.

The Ten Commandments are the foundation of the moral code, and the basis of the legal system of justice for western civilization.  When Mahatma Ghandi was asked what he thought of western civilization, he said it would be a good idea.  The distance western civilization has moved from its original purpose can be seen most clearly in its total disregard for the fifth commandment: ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’.  

Literally billions of innocent defenseless animals are killed annually to satisfy the taste of human carnivores.  They are tortured and murdered for the use of their skin, fur, and wool for human clothing.  Non-human individuals experience horrendous acts of torture and murder for ‘tests’, and ‘entertainment’.

Nowhere does it state that the Ten Commandments apply only to the human species.  Disregard for the welfare of all species causes zoonotic pandemics, climate change, pollution, hunger, human mortality and morbidity, and could be reduced or eliminated by simply following the Fifth Commandment –“Thou Shalt Not Kill”!  Go Vegan!