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THE BIG READ

These articles require a bit more time to digest, but they are worth getting into! Settle in for some thought-provoking reading.

Is Hollywood the tool that animal advocates should be using?

Is Hollywood the tool that animal advocates should be using?

Cinema for social change is a proven force. Animal advocates should be taking advantage of film to enhance the message.

“Coffee Wars,” a new movie starring singer, actor, and vegan activist Kate Nash hit streaming services last month, to the delight of certain plant-based corners of the internet.

The story follows a down-on-her-luck vegan café owner (Nash) as she enters a global barista competition — despite the competition’s rules strictly requiring the use of dairy milk. The fiery protagonist and her team of colleagues approach their mission as a “revolution,” an upheaval necessary to protect the planet and end animal exploitation. The vegan ethos goes beyond the script. Only non-dairy milk was used on set, and wardrobe, makeup, and hair styling products were chosen ethically as well, with sustainability as a priority. Perhaps most significantly, the filmmakers have pledged to donate all profits from the film to related charities.

It’s little wonder that animal activists have been excited for the movie’s release. The landscape of films made with social change in mind has grown to include more and more stories with themes relating to climate change (i.e, “Don’t Look Up,” “mother!,” and the “Jurassic World Dominion”). Still, almost none of them deal directly with factory farming and the way our food systems exploit animals. It’s exciting to see a movie written and produced with those issues at the forefront, and the filmmakers’ efforts are certainly commendable. However, that “Coffee Wars” unfortunately falls into the use of unflattering vegan stereotypes and fails to engage more deeply with the subject matter at hand.

Cinema for social change is a proven force. For example, throughout the late 90s and early 00s, films and TV shows like “Boys Don’t Cry” and “Ellen” introduced queer identities to audiences with humanizing, touching, and often hilarious narratives and performances. One study that analyzed attitudes around homosexuality found that “For those viewers with the fewest direct gay contacts, exposure to Will & Grace appears to have the strongest potential influence on reducing sexual prejudice.” As Katharine Gammon writes in The Atlantic, “Screenwriters have reason to believe that even passing mentions… can transform public attitudes. Americans watch an average of three hours of television every day, meaning that they spend almost a fifth of their waking lives in the worlds it creates. History shows that issues raised on television can lead to real-world change…” Indeed, narrative works (like movies, TV, and even other media like books and video games), have done a lot to educate and inspire empathy for marginalized people in a way that facts and figures alone have not.

Animal rights activists could use narrative media in similar ways, to expose viewers to real societal problems through approachable stories that appeal to not just their intellect, but to their emotions and senses of humor, too. Before, “Coffee Wars,” Bong Joon-ho’s 2017 film “Okja” for Netflix was the best (and possibly the only) example of a contemporary film that addresses animal exploitation under capitalism. But of course, one movie does not a revolution make. It’s encouraging that more filmmakers are adding to the conversation with new works like “Coffee Wars.” Factory farming is a high-stakes issue. As Nash’s character informs a customer, the cows are “milked and milked and milked until their bones are so brittle they can’t even stand.” As such, the industry deserves to be explored on the biggest of screens.

The best change-inspiring cinematic works all have a few things in common: they’re compelling and clever, they go beyond headlines, and they delve deep into worlds that the average person would otherwise never see. Sadly, this is where “Coffee Wars” falls short. While the script does manage to squeeze in some informative tidbits like the above, it offers little that people don’t already know. Protagonist Jo and her team, despite strong performances from the actors, largely reflect unflattering stereotypes of vegans: angry, combative, irrational, and single-minded. One early scene in the film depicts Jo screaming at the customer for requesting dairy milk in her coffee.

Flashbacks show that the origin of Jo’s convictions is her upbringing on a pastoral dairy farm in the English countryside. Portraying such a farm was a strange choice from the writers, as it’s misleadingly pleasant and nothing like the reality of the industrial farms that produce the vast majority of our food supply. If you’re not someone who already sees yourself in Jo, you’re likely to interpret her as the classic caricature of a vegan — unreasonable, grating, self-righteous, and disproportionate in their response to the world around them. Since the film depicts a nearly idyllic representation of dairy farming, viewers aren’t given a compelling reason to side with Jo if they didn’t already share her perspective. The movie focuses more on the social status of vegans and plant-based milks, rather than the actual issues. It’s a movie by and for vegans, but sadly not one that’s likely to challenge non-vegans’ views of industrial animal agriculture.

Hopefully, the areas where “Coffee Wars” falls short will be taken as opportunities for filmmakers to make a greater impact going forward. There’s so much room for stories that depict the ugly realities of factory farming, or those that inspire a deeper appreciation for the planet and the other animals with which we share it. There’s a vacancy for stories about undocumented people working dangerous, exploitative jobs on factory farms; about communities gravely affected by agricultural runoff; about people making breakthroughs in the fields of plant-based and cell-cultured meat or running animal sanctuaries. A movie could inspire social change without focusing on veganism at all — after all, industrial animal agriculture is an issue that affects the entire world. You don’t need to be a green-haired barista to care about it.

Storytelling is a powerful tool to inspire empathy, education, passion, and change. Hopefully, the future of film will bring us stories that inform audiences about real-life issues, earn an emotional response, and inspire us to imagine a future starkly different from our present. “Coffee Wars” is setting a stunning example by donating its profits and making material choices to pursue sustainability in a field that’s often incredibly wasteful. I would love to see that dedication behind all sorts of stories and storytelling techniques. Hollywood, this is your cue.

Original source: https://www.forbes.com

 

What fuels German support for a meat tax?

What fuels German support for a meat tax?

According to this research paper German consumers are more likely to support a meat tax on animal products for animal welfare reasons.

A tax on meat could help address the climate impact and animal welfare issues associated with the production of meat.

The animal farming industry is in the public eye. Consumption and production of meat and dairy products and their consequences are discussed in society and politics alike. The livestock sector accounts for 14.5% of all human-induced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Breeding and husbandry conditions, especially in intensive livestock farming, lead to animal diseases or painful disease-prevention measures such as tail-docking pigs

Working conditions in meat processing firms have also drawn increasing attention of policymakers, which has partly resulted in legislative amendments.

From a health perspective, meat consumption levels are too high in industrialized nations, leading to increased risks for colorectal cancer and cardiovascular diseases, and eventually straining public health systems.

Given the diverse deficiencies of the animal farming and meat production systems, policymakers are increasingly accounting for them, such as in the European Commission’s Farm to Fork strategy. Alongside setting stricter rules and standards for producers, one potential intervention could be the introduction of a tax on meat and animal products. Modelling studies show that taxing meat and animal products could have strong steering effects, thus improving public health and reducing the environmental impact.

In Germany, policymakers are discussing a tax on meat to address two of the issues named above, namely the climate and animal welfare aspects. In the context of introducing a carbon price for fossil fuels in the heating and transportation sector, the German Green Party suggested a climate charge on animal products. In addition, an expert commission set up by the then German Minister of Food and Agriculture suggested implementing a fixed animal welfare consumption tax, the so-called Tierwohlabgabe, on every kilogram of meat sold, with revenues intended to support farms in improving husbandry conditions.

In April 2022, the expert commission reminded the new government of its recommendation. The climate change and animal welfare debates are conducted rather independently of one another, although they concern the same industry and the same products. We therefore focus on these two aspects while acknowledging that there are other reasons to motivate meat taxation such as biodiversity loss, water pollution and health concerns.

The introduction of taxes on food is undoubtedly a political challenge, particularly in times of high inflation and globally rising food prices. Numerous surveys and choice experiments have examined individuals’ preferences regarding (carbon) tax schemes in general, and animal products in particular. Several policy characteristics have been found to increase public support, for example, refraining from calling the charge a tax, earmarking revenues, establishing progressive taxation and clearly explaining the tax’s impact.

In this article, we varied additional tax attributes to determine their impact on support for meat taxation. Motivated by the two justifications discussed by policymakers in Germany, we tested if support rates for a tax on meat differ depending on whether the tax is levied to mitigate climate change or to improve animal welfare. On the basis of previous findings on the effectiveness or stated importance of different reasons to reduce meat consumption, we hypothesized that support is higher for a tax aiming to promote animal welfare.

In addition, we compared two versions of a per-unit excise tax varying in their degree of differentiation. The uniform variant charges a fixed amount on every kilogram of meat sold, independent from the meat’s carbon footprint or the husbandry conditions. Examples for such a tax type are the proposed Tierwohlabgabe of the German expert commission and the German electricity tax. The second variant is, in the spirit of a Pigouvian tax, differentiated to represent differences in external damages associated with the product, such as alcohol or tobacco taxes and the German CO2 price on fuels.

Meat types with a higher carbon footprint in case of a climate tax, or produced by farms with poorer husbandry conditions in case of an animal welfare tax, are charged a higher tax rate per kilogram than those with lower emissions or better husbandry conditions, respectively. The two tax types are expected to affect consumption differently. A uniform tax primarily reduces meat consumption overall as it does not change relative prices within meat categories. A differentiated tax is expected to affect both the level as well as the composition of meat products consumed. The latter is due to increased prices of products associated with higher damages to other human and non-human beings. The additional steering effect of a differentiated tax helps to reduce these damages and is hence typically considered to better improve human and animal welfare compared with a uniform tax. We tested whether voters appreciate the Pigouvian idea once all other tax attributes, including earmarking of revenues, are held constant.

We presumed voters’ perceptions of the tax’s impact on consumption patterns to affect support rates. While there are, a priori, no reasons to expect that the justification of a tax influences its impact on consumption patterns, we would anticipate such effects for the degree of differentiation. However, whether consumers anticipate this difference and how it might affect their stated support remains to be seen. Research on the acceptance of congestion charges, waste taxes and a carbon tax finds that trial periods increase support and people update their beliefs regarding the tax. Thus, we tested whether varying the salience of expected behavioural effects on consumption affects support rates. If participants anticipate the stronger steering effect of a differentiated tax and appreciate it, then higher support rates would be expected if this is made more salient. We increased salience for a subgroup by asking participants to reflect upon the tax’s potential impact on consumption behaviour before eliciting their support.

We addressed all three attributes discussed above in a referendum choice experiment, in which a sample representative of the German adult online population was asked to vote on a tax on meat. The referendum setting was chosen as previous studies find that referendum surveys are externally valid and incentive compatible if perceived to be consequential. To increase consequentiality, participants knew that referendum results of this study will be sent to the committees of the German parliament responsible for agriculture and the environment, allowing policymakers to update their beliefs about public support for a tax on meat. We randomly assigned participants to one of two tax purposes (animal welfare versus climate), one of two tax types (uniform versus differentiated tax) and one of two salience levels (low versus high salience of the tax’s effect), that is, eight treatment groups. Within subjects, proposals differed only in tax level, which was gradually increasing from the first to the last proposal. Participants had to make a decision on six consecutive proposals.

Our results contribute to the delicate topic of how to reduce meat consumption as one of the big societal, environmental and ethical challenges humanity faces. As the paper focuses on public support and, in particular, on hypothetical voting in a referendum, the approach is, by design, anthropocentric, as only the preferences and values held by participants drive the results of the study. The paper is not concerned with why society should tax meat, but rather on how specific features, including justifications, affect support rates for such a tax. We add to the literature on instruments to influence meat consumption, more specifically on what affects people’s support for the rather heavy-handed fiscal intervention of a tax on meat. This complements studies looking into consumers’ preferences regarding information provision and labels on meat products.

By considering two different rationales for a tax on meat (climate protection versus animal welfare), we broaden research on the acceptance of carbon taxes by the animal welfare aspect. We thereby address different arguments for meat taxation as requested by Fesenfeld et al. and extend the findings by Fesenfeld et al. on willingness to pay for a tax for animal welfare, climate, local environment and health frames in Germany. Moreover, we complement the emerging literature on the link between tax support and use of tax revenues. We also take current policy discussions into account by comparing a Pigouvian tax – which is usually favoured by economists – to a uniform tax debated in Germany. Empirical evidence on whether support rates differ between a uniform and a differentiated tax on meat remains limited.

Tax justification and level drive support rates

We tested pre-registered hypotheses on the impact of the attributes of a tax on meat on support by voters. The attributes considered are: tax level and differentiation thereof, justification and salience. As in a real referendum, we counted only valid responses, that is, Yes and No votes. The support rate thus equals the share of Yes votes among valid votes. Rates of abstention are similar across all tax levels and schemes, ranging from 6% to 8%

The percentage of votes in favour of the proposed tax on meat monotonically decreases by 2.6 percentage points (here, and in the following, we report 95% confidence intervals (CI) (−2.49 pp, −2.78 pp)) for each €0.10 kg increase in the tax rate. The average support rate is 62% at the lowest tax level of €0.19 kg, corresponding to a carbon price of €25 t CO2. At this level only, every proposed tax scheme would receive a simple majority. Support monotonically decreases in the tax rate and reaches on average 23% at the highest tax rate of €1.56 kg, corresponding to €200 t CO2. This confirms our hypothesis that support is decreasing in the tax level. Fifty per cent of participants would still support a tax level of €0.39 kg if linearly interpolated.

Support for climate-justified taxes is significantly lower than for otherwise identical animal welfare-justified taxes across all tax levels. On average, an animal welfare tax receives 11.1 percentage points (8.3 pp, 14.0 pp) more Yes votes than an otherwise identical carbon tax. This again is in line with the pre-registered hypothesis. All estimates are similar and highly statistically significant across models. Interestingly, the degree of differentiation of the tax has at most a minor and statistically not significant impact on support rates (β = 0.024, (−1.6 pp, 6.4 pp)), which counters our hypothesis.

High salience increases the support rate by 4.0 percentage points (0.0 pp, 8.1 pp). Participants who were induced to think about the potential effect of the proposed tax before they vote are thus more likely to support the scheme. However, we find no significant interaction between salience and the degree of differentiation (β = −0.007, (−6.5 pp, 5.0 pp)). The interaction term is close to zero and statistically insignificant. Counter to our pre-registered hypothesis, the effect of a differentiated tax is not more pronounced in the case of high salience.

Expected tax impact varies by justification and differentiation

We conducted an analysis of participants’ beliefs about the behavioural impacts of the tax schemes. This analysis is exploratory given the hypotheses tested were not pre-registered. It aims at providing insights on what might drive the main results presented in the previous section. Participants stated their expectation about the market-wide development of meat consumption if the proposed tax scheme was to be implemented. Figure 3 shows average marginal effects on the probability of choosing the three possible answer categories (decrease, remain the same or increase) from generalized ordered logistic regressions for overall meat consumption and consumption in the subcategories beef/husbandry level 1, lamb/husbandry level 2, pork/husbandry level 3 and poultry/husbandry level 4, respectively.

Looking at tax types, we find that participants expect the differentiated tax to be significantly more effective in steering meat consumption towards lower-impact meat compared with the uniform one. For the two meat types/husbandry levels that are taxed the most under a differentiated tax, the probability of choosing ‘decrease’ is significantly higher for those facing a differentiated rather than a uniform tax. The opposite applies for the two meat types/husbandry levels that are taxed the least under a differentiated tax. Looking at answer option ‘increase’, the marginal effects are reversed. In addition, participants expect overall meat consumption not to be impacted by the degree of differentiation, which is consistent if effects from the four subcategories cancel each other out.

Regarding the tax’s justification, we find that participants expect the climate tax to be significantly more likely to decrease consumption in all meat type/husbandry level subcategories compared with the animal welfare tax. Even if we look at the uniform tax subsample only, we find the same differences. For a uniform tax, prices of all meat products on the market rise by the same amount, independent of whether the levy is raised for climate or animal welfare purposes. Thus, effects cannot be driven by perceived or real differences in the market shares of husbandry/meat type categories or different degrees of substitutability between them. Moreover, participants do not expect a significantly different effect of the climate tax compared with the animal welfare tax for overall meat consumption, which contradicts responses for the subcategories of consumption.

Our study provides important insights for policymakers on how to design a tax on meat to receive public support. First, supported tax levels are found to be rather low in our experiment. At the lowest tested tax rate of, on average, €0.19 kg (equivalent to €25 t CO2), a simple majority of participants votes in favour of a tax on meat in every tax scheme suggested. For the second lowest tax rate of, on average, €0.39 kg (or €50 t CO2), only taxes justified by animal welfare win a referendum. This level of an animal welfare tax matches the proposal by the expert commission reporting to the previous German government. Thus, the proposal is backed by voters at the time of the experiment. We acknowledge that support for the actual tax rates tested represents a snapshot given participants’ current disposable income, recent societal debates and other structural and individual factors. Nonetheless, given that the rate of support for a tax on meat is strongly decreasing, in particular, at the lower end of the range tested in our study as well as in the extant literature, we recommend starting with a low rate when introducing a tax on meat. Following a ratcheting-up strategy is likely to receive more support than trying to go full scale initially. However, more research is needed to determine the exact relationship between (dynamic) tax rates and public support.

We find that participants are more willing to vote for a tax if its purpose is to improve animal welfare as opposed to reducing the climate impact of meat products. This complements results from (choice) experiments and surveys on labels and information provision, in which animal welfare arguments are found to be more important or effective in inducing intrinsically motivated behavioural change than climate protection arguments. The stronger appeal of animal welfare motives is also present in the context of the more intrusive intervention of a tax on meat.

Our result is, however, in contrast to Fesenfeld et al. who find no significant differences between the two framings. This difference in findings might be driven by the naming and description of the tax schemes in the two studies. They tested how different independent frames (climate change mitigation, animal welfare and health benefits) affect support for a tax on meat. In contrast, we made the frame explicit in the tax name, calling it ‘animal welfare’ or ‘climate levy’. The explicit framing in the tax name might send a more credible signal to participants that animal welfare is actually addressed with the tax, increasing support. Moreover, the lack of information in Fesenfeld et al. on how the tax revenues would be spent might have substantially reduced support for a tax in their study, and hence made it more difficult to detect differences between frames. In contrast, we stated that tax revenues are earmarked and provided detailed information on which meat types or animal welfare levels are taxed and why. Especially for animal welfare, voters might be more supportive if they have a concrete idea of how animals might benefit from a tax. While earmarking seems to be less important when considering combined support of several food policies, it is found to be a crucial success factor for acceptance of a stand-alone carbon tax, and hence maybe also for a stand-alone tax on meat. The design of our study does not allow distinguishing between the framing and the earmarking aspect. Specifying their relative importance is left for future research.

Surprisingly, participants seem to attribute a stronger steering effect to a climate tax compared with an animal welfare tax, even if they are identical in all other respects. We can only hypothesize why this is the case. Preferences for animal welfare taxes might not be driven by beliefs in their ability to reduce meat consumption, but potentially by beliefs in their effectiveness of promoting animal welfare independent of the amount of meat consumed. This is plausible if consumers consider the lives of farm animals to be worth living and are not primarily concerned about the fact that animals have to be killed to produce meat. Moreover, participants might expect additional individual benefits from paying an animal welfare tax because they associate healthier or tastier products with higher animal welfare standards. In the latter case, participants would consider animal welfare not only as a public good, but would also derive private benefits from improving rearing conditions (for similar thoughts regarding labelling antibiotic use on meat products, see refs.). Future research could look into drivers behind preferences for an animal welfare tax. For policymakers, this shows that justifications matter, potentially more so than expected impacts on behaviour. Our study does not shed light on the question of whether combining justifications (and splitting revenues) would improve or weaken support for the measure.

Our findings show that the degree of differentiation does not play an important role in shaping support for a tax on meat. Simulation studies in other contexts, namely sugar-sweetened beverages, suggest that a differentiated tax is more effective in reducing externalities. As answers to the belief questions show, participants on average understand the mechanism behind a differentiated tax and also expect a stronger steering effect from this tax type. However, we only find a minor and mostly statistically insignificant positive effect on support compared with a uniform tax. Raising the salience of the stronger steering effect has no impact on support rates. We conclude that voters might well understand that Pigouvian taxes are more effective in changing consumption patterns than uniform ones, but that they do not appreciate this. This finding is in line with empirical results by Kallbekken et al. who find that support rates for a Pigouvian tax in a laboratory experiment do not increase if participants are informed about its benefits. Our results confirm their findings and extend them in two directions. The lack of a significant interaction effect between raising the salience of a proposed tax scheme and the degree of differentiation is analogous to their observation that educating participants about the additional steering effect does not systematically change support rates. This builds our first extension, that is, that, on average, participants are able to qualitatively anticipate the steering effect of differentiated taxes in a more complex real-world setting without being educated about them by the experimenter. Second, we directly compare support for a Pigouvian with support for a uniform tax. Our results show that adding a steering effect does not increase support rates compared with a tax that is identical in all other features. Overall, the results substantiate the point that the indifference found between uniform and differentiated taxes is not primarily driven by participants who do not understand how the tax schemes differ, but it is rather caused by a lack of caring about this difference. This provides relevant insights for policymakers. The indifference between Pigouvian and uniform tax is at least partially good news for them as there is low risk in implementing the more effective differentiated tax. The recommendation is weakly backed by comments in the Remarks fields of our survey. Thirty-eight participants who had been assigned to a uniform tax treatment criticize the lack of differentiation or state that they would prefer a differentiated tax. On the other hand, only one participant in the differentiated treatments asks for a uniform tax.

Given that we find a positive effect of high salience on support rates, we additionally recommend communicating the tax’s desired behavioural impact very clearly to win the public over. Our result supports previous findings that experiencing the effect of a tax in trial periods makes people more likely to support it if thinking the effect through is indeed a proxy for such a trial experience.

To conclude, there is support for a tax on meat in Germany, but only under certain conditions that policymakers would benefit from taking into account. The version recently suggested by a government-installed expert commission meets these criteria, but more effective taxes would also be supported by voters. While we focus on Germany, other countries have been, or are currently, discussing different forms of a tax on meat as well. In October 2022, New Zealand’s government proposed to price livestock emissions at the farm level with revenues used to support farmers in their efforts to reduce emissions. This corresponds to the differentiated tax treatment in our study as the price impact will differ in line with the emission intensity of meat types. In the Netherlands, policymakers presented concrete proposals to implement a tax but so far have not been able to convince a majority in parliament. In the UK, meat taxation was discussed, but despite being found to have a substantial potential impact on GHG emissions and public health, it was explicitly disregarded from the National Food Strategy published in 2021 due to potential lack of acceptance among citizens. The Danish Council of Ethics, a Danish think tank, recommended a tax on red meat for Denmark in 2016, which was refused by politicians. Our findings could be particularly relevant for the failed proposals by checking if the taxes could have been defined or framed differently. Future research could leverage our design and compare support rates internationally.

Original source: https://www.nature.com

 

How to stay sane living through the climate catastrophe

How to stay sane living through the climate catastrophe

Helpful information on how you can take care of your mental health as you confront extreme weather events and climate change.

Climate change is ushering in stronger hurricanes, severe droughts, wildfires and other extreme weather events in Texas. These natural disasters can be devastating, uprooting communities and leaving residents with trauma and a long road to recovery. And it’s hard to not feel hopeless reading headlines about the inevitability of climate change and its role in worsening extreme weather events.

But there are resources for mental health support available year-round and deployed in the wake of natural disasters. Plus, there are steps you can take to manage climate anxiety. Here is more information on how you can take care of your mental health as you confront extreme weather events and climate change.

How do you prepare for a natural disaster when it comes to your mental health?

Control what you can: Your response. The threat of a looming natural disaster, such as a hurricane, can cause anxiety and exacerbate symptoms in those who may already face mental health concerns, said Lane Johnson, a licensed professional counselor and chief of clinical services at the Gulf Bend Center in Victoria. The center is one of the local mental health and behavioral health authorities contracted by the Texas government to help deliver and coordinate mental health care. “If you’ve got some mental health concerns, you’re already under stress. And, oftentimes, it’s difficult to feel safe,” he said. “If a natural disaster is coming, that just raises the anxiety all the more. We all get frantic and anxious.”

For people with mental health concerns, it’s important to monitor and address day-to-day symptoms, Johnson said. They should also focus on preparing for the natural disaster, like everyone else.
“That’s important not only because technical preparation is important, but being prepared and anticipating (a storm) gives you a sense of control,” said Wayne Young, CEO of the Harris Center for Mental Health and IDD in Houston.

That means stocking up on nonperishable food, water, first-aid supplies, gear such as flashlights, cash in case of power outages and charging up your phone. If you have prescriptions, you should also get them refilled in case of long-term disruptions.

You may need proof of your identification, residency, medical needs or immigration status in the aftermath of a disaster, so gather and make copies of those documents ahead of time.

You should also save phone numbers for people and agencies you can look to for help during or after a disaster, Johnson said. Common disaster resources include:

  • Call 911 for life-threatening emergencies.
  • Text SHELTER and your ZIP code to 43362 to find shelters with help from FEMA. (This may refer you to check with local officials or online.)
  • Call or text 800-985-5990 for crisis counseling from SAMHSA’s Disaster Distress Helpline.
  • Call 800-733-2767 to get help from the American Red Cross, including housing and shelter, financial assistance, health services and mental health assistance.
  • Call 211 or 877-541-7905 for information on Texas disaster and social services, including local mental health care resources.
  • Call 800-504-7030 if you are low-income and need legal assistance related to natural disasters and documents to get help from the State Bar of Texas.

Seek out a support network. Getting a trusted person to walk you through the steps you need to take to prepare can help ease stress. At the Gulf Bend Center, staffers help their patients go through a checklist of hurricane precautions, Johnson said. “Look for support systems, be it neighbors or family,” Johnson said. “Don’t try to go it alone.” Connecting with people who understand you is key, Young said. For example, some people reach out to their faith community.

Take care of your mental health even before disaster strikes. Understanding your mental health, symptoms and effective coping skills before a disaster takes place will help you better self-manage symptoms during moments of stress, Young said. If you have advance notice before a disaster, such as a hurricane or a storm, it can also help to set aside time to relax or exercise, Young said.

During a disaster, how do you seek mental health help?

The federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, also known as SAMHSA, runs a Disaster Distress Helpline to provide support to people experiencing emotional distress related to disasters, including severe storms, hurricanes, floods, wildfires, disease outbreaks, incidents of mass violence, community unrest and anniversaries of traumatic events or triggering events.

The helpline operates year-round, 24 hours a day and is free and confidential. You can call or text 800-985-5990 to be connected with a trained crisis counselor who can provide counseling, healthy coping tips and more information on signs of emotional distress. Crisis counselors can also refer you to local resources for additional support.

Spanish speakers can press 2 after calling for support in Spanish, and help in other languages is available through a third-party interpretation service by requesting it from the responding counselor. The SAMHSA also offers videophone services online for people who are deaf or hard of hearing.

How can natural disasters affect your mental health?

It is normal for people to experience shock in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. Some people, like those with existing mental health conditions, may see increased symptoms of stress. “During adverse circumstances, it’s normal to have abnormal reactions,” Johnson said. “And so we try to help people understand that you’re going to have trouble, but it’s all manageable and we’ll help you manage it.”

Others may go into “overdrive” and focus on helping and recovery efforts, Johnson said. But those individuals may feel symptoms of stress or trauma later on. Here are some symptoms to watch for:

  • Headaches or stomachaches.
  • Muscle or chest pain.
  • Trouble sleeping.
  • Changes in appetite.
  • Feeling overwhelmed, sad, numb, lonely, or physically or mentally drained.
  • Losing motivation or focus.
  • Getting frustrated and arguing more frequently.

Most emotional responses and stress symptoms are temporary, but if they persist for two weeks or longer, seek help. Signs of greater emotional distress, according to the SAMHSA, can include the following:

  • Feeling helpless or hopeless.
  • Excessive smoking, drinking or drug use, including prescription drugs.
  • Feeling guilty without being sure why.
  • Thinking of hurting yourself or someone else.
  • Having difficulty readjusting to home or work life.

Warning signs in children can look like withdrawing from friends and peers, competing for more attention, being unwilling to leave home and becoming aggressive. Teens may also resist authority and “experiment with high-risk behaviors such as underage drinking or prescription drug misuse and abuse,” according to the SAMHSA.

People may also have adverse reactions to situations that remind them of the disaster. For example, for Johnson, the sound of wind made him anxious months after Hurricane Harvey in 2017. “I didn’t lose my ability to function, but I had to recognize that I, too, am going to have some sort of trauma reaction,” he said.

These triggers can “renew feelings of fear, anxiety, and sadness,” according to the SAMHSA. Trigger events tend to take place during anniversaries of disasters, but they can occur at any time. Doing things you enjoy and talking to others during these events can help.

How do you get help if you’re experiencing mental health concerns after a natural disaster?

See if disaster aid may be available to you. After federally declared disasters, SAMHSA administers grants to help provide more crisis counseling services. Those services are free for people if they reside within a disaster-declared county, said Tiffany Young, a spokesperson for Texas Health and Human Services. You can check federal disaster declarations and resources through FEMA’s website.

Find your local mental health care network. The state contracts with 37 local mental health authorities and two local behavioral health authorities to cover Texas’ 254 counties, according to Texas Health and Human Services. The local authorities can bring in providers from other regions to meet demand after a disaster, Young said. You can call 211 or go to the websites for 211 or mentalhealthtx.org to find your local authority.

See if your employer or health insurance can help. Local mental health authorities can also provide long-term care, Young said. But disaster grants can be limited to a short window of time, said Alison Mohr Boleware, policy director for the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health. That can make accessing support difficult for those who may still be recovering from a disaster from several years ago, like Harvey.

She suggests checking to see if your employer has an employee assistance program, which may include free therapy sessions, or if your insurance provider covers any mental health care.
Peer support has also been shown to be effective and important to disaster recovery, Boleware said. You can find local support groups through the National Alliance on Mental Illness of Texas, which has chapters across the state.

How to cope with climate or eco-anxiety

It’s normal to experience anxiety or distress related to climate change. Some researchers have begun to use new terms including “climate anxiety,” and “eco-anxiety,” and “eco-grief” to describe mental health conditions influenced by climate change. Even if you have not experienced a natural disaster, news of natural disasters and climate change can be overwhelming. And more people are feeling it. In 2021, Grist reported Google searches for the term “climate anxiety” rose by 565% over 12 months. “The uncertainty and that kind of threat looms large for everybody,” Young, CEO of the Harris Center, said. “All of the uncertainty creates distress. If we’re not already in a place with strong resiliency and wellness then that can impact us even greater.”

Climate and eco-anxiety, the definitions and characteristics of which are still an area of active research in the mental health field, can also look like grieving, hopelessness and rage, according to Britt Wray, a Stanford University researcher and author of the book “Generation Dread.”

These feelings are a “very healthy and normal response” to the awareness of climate change and its ramifications, but it can become a problem if it hinders a person’s well-being or ability to function, Wray told Smithsonian Magazine.

Mindfulness, meditation, breathing exercises and spending time in nature can help calm down your central nervous system, which can become unbalanced from anxiety.

Talking about it and taking action helps. Studies have shown that talking and writing about your emotions can improve your mental health, and confronting fears can reduce anxiety. If you can access a therapist, you might want to try to find a “climate-aware therapist” or one who will help you process your climate anxiety while acknowledging the effects of climate change. The Climate Psychology Alliance is working on a directory of climate-aware therapists. It currently lists more than 100 therapists across the country, including in Austin, Houston and North Texas.

You can also find support among other people with climate change concerns. The groups Good Grief Network, the Climate Journal Project, The All We Can Save Project, Eco-Anxious Stories and Parents For The Planet help facilitate discussions.

You can’t address climate change alone, but taking steps, such as preparing your home for disasters, volunteering in the wake of natural disasters and protecting your local environment, can help you and your community.

The New York Times has more mental health tips and ideas for ways to help your community address climate change, and NPR has a guide on grappling with climate anxiety. More books on climate anxiety include “A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety” by Sarah Jaquette Ray and “Turn the Tide on Climate Anxiety” by Megan Kennedy-Woodard and Patrick Kennedy-Williams.

Original source: https://www.texastribune.org

 

200 years since the first law on animal welfare was passed – what have we learned?

200 years since the first law on animal welfare was passed – what have we learned?

Dubbed “Martin’s Act”, the 1822 legislation had some impact on the way animals were treated, but even today there is much that can still be done.

Two centuries ago, on July 22, 1822 to be precise, Richard Martin learned that King George IV had signed into law An Act to Prevent the Cruel and Improper Treatment of Cattle. The Galway-born U.K. parliamentarian, called “Humanity Dick” by the king, went down in history as the sponsor of the first animal welfare legislation in a modern democracy.

For good and for ill, the law laid down a new marker for animal welfare legislation. Because the Act considered some animals but not others, it didn’t disrupt the reasons why animals were exploited. In essence, the Act codified that exploitation. Yet it was also a necessary recognition that you couldn’t just do what you wanted with the animals you owned, which was a radical idea two centuries ago.

Impetuous, pugnacious, and perpetually in flight from creditors, Martin cut a distinctive figure even then. In addition to animal welfare, he campaigned for the abolition of slavery and for Catholic emancipation.

The Act’s passage was galvanizing. There were sixty-three convictions in its first year. Martin himself occasionally arrested, prosecuted, tried and sentenced malfeasants. On one occasion, he accosted a street vendor named Bill Burns and took him to court for mistreating his donkey, whose injuries he displayed to the judge and jury. Two years later, when enforcement of the Act still proved challenging, twenty-one men, including the abolitionist William Wilberforce and Martin himself, met at Old Slaughter’s Coffee House in St. Martin’s Lane, in London, to form the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, an organization that exists to this day.

Yet Martin’s Act was limited in scope. It sought to reduce cruel and unnecessary suffering for cattle, horses and sheep, but didn’t inhibit their customary use or question whether they should be worked or eaten at all. It didn’t protect birds, whom Martin (the largest landowner in Ireland) liked to shoot, or animals who were hunted, which Martin did with relish.

Even though Martin and other aristocrats wanted the leisure activities of the urban working-class, like bear-baiting or dog-fighting, banned because they feared they corrupted their morals, they wanted the “sports” they valued (horse-racing, foxhunting, shooting, and fishing among them) to remain relatively unregulated.

For the animals covered by Martin’s Act, the situation was hardly rosy. Ultimately, mechanized transport removed cattle, oxen, horses, and sheep from city streets, where their cruel treatment and suffering were visible, to be crated inside industrial facilities and dismembered in slaughterhouses by the tens of billions – numbers that would have staggered Martin and his contemporaries.

Independent legal rights for animals are still non-existent today. In a recent legal case brought by the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) to release Happy the elephant from solitary confinement at the Bronx Zoo, five of the seven judges on the New York Court of Appeals rejected NhRP’s writ of habeas corpus on Happy’s behalf. One argument used by the majority was that statutory regulations already existed to ensure Happy’s happiness: ipso facto, Happy could not be unhappy.

In his remaining years in parliament, Humanity Dick tried to ban bear- and badger-baiting, end dog fights, regulate the treatment of horses awaiting slaughter, and extend his Act to dogs, cats, monkeys, and other animals. These, and all the other welfare bills he introduced, failed. Many were considered beneath the proper concern of parliamentarians.

Nonetheless, his was the work of democracy: to persuade people that animals mattered, and that they deserved to have some rights independent of their utility to us.

Our task in the U.S. and U.K. is to continue that work: to ensure that advocates argue for animals’ welfare within all major political parties, and present a positive vegan lifestyle accompanied by campaigns for institutional change. Galvanizing the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities on behalf of legislative change offers a multipronged approach to animal rights.

There’s reason for some hope. In the last several decades, ethologists have demonstrated the depth and breadth of animal cognition, sociality and sentience, including with creatures – like fish, octopuses, crustaceans, and even insects – once assumed to possess none. To assign a personal pronoun to an animal (as we do here) no longer seems weird. Legislatively, the U.K. Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act, passed in April this year, recognizes that animals have wishes, needs and desires, as to some degree did the New York Court of Appeals with Happy.

Our view of the next three decades is mixed. It may be that when we discover robots have feelings, we’ll reconsider our ruthless manipulation of beings made of flesh and blood, like us. Further development of plant-, fungal-, or cultivated-meat substitutes may curtail animal exploitation, just as the combustion engine did with horse power.

The deepening climate crisis, and animal agriculture’s outsized impact on it, may force us to redirect food, water, and land toward nourishing people rather than raising animals or feedstock, or destroying biodiversity. COVID’s unmasking of the increasing spread of zoonotic diseases, antimicrobial resistance due to nontherapeutic antibiotic use, and the heartless treatment of humans and animals in industrial slaughterhouses may lead to greater awareness of how animal exploitation is a public health catastrophe, as well as an ecological disaster.

Two centuries later, we raise half a glass to Humanity Dick, recognizing that we don’t have the luxury of another two centuries to ensure the survival of any species of animal subject to this law. Especially our own.

Original source: https://sentientmedia.org

 

Price has the biggest influence on consumer choices, says study

Price has the biggest influence on consumer choices, says study

A new study sought to analyse consumer habits when it comes to choosing between meat and vegan alternative options.

Animal products account for 48% of sales in the U.S. agricultural sector, meaning that the industry remains heavily tied to animal agriculture. In recent years there has also been huge growth in the plant-based protein market, with $2.3 billion invested into new ventures in 2021 alone. But what is the economic impact of these alternatives, and how much of the alternative meat industry is supported by meat-eaters (versus people on a plant-based or reducetarian diet)?

This study explored the effects of pricing, labeling, and socio-economic factors on consumer choices between plant-based meat and conventional meat. The authors analyzed 3225 survey responses from U.S. consumers across four experiments. Of those surveyed, 68% reported regularly eating meat, 12% reported being flexitarian, 7% vegan, 4% vegetarian, and 9% responded with “none of the above.” Those who claimed to follow an alternative diet were grouped into one “non-regular meat consumer” category (32%).

In the first experiment, participants could choose between a beef burger and a plant-based Beyond Meat Burger. The options were equally priced, but the labelling and information provided varied. Specifically, some participants were given the choice of an organic beef burger, while others were given nutritional information or a full ingredient list for the conventional and plant-based options. The presence of ingredients and nutritional information did not affect burger choice. Nor did presenting consumers with an organic burger instead of a regular beef burger. Overall, the Beyond Meat option was selected 27% time, which dropped to 18% for regular meat consumers. Omnivores who chose the Beyond Meat option were more likely to be men under 35, residents of Western states, and have children under 12.

In the second experiment, participants could choose one of four options from a “menu” — a beef burger, a bacon beef burger, a chicken sandwich, or a chicken wrap. The researchers changed the prices of each item and asked participants to choose nine different times. Afterward, the experiment was repeated with a Beyond Meat Burger instead of the chicken wrap. Beef burger selections decreased from 53% to 51% when the Beyond Burger was introduced. Participants would pay more for the beef burger ($8.85) than Beyond Burger ($7.74), and the plant-based burger would need to be $1.11 cheaper for an average omnivore to be equally likely to select it over the beef option. Given the high price tag on a Beyond Meat Burger, this means that a typical consumer would be unlikely to purchase it over conventional beef. The good news is that conventional meat-eaters were more likely to change their food choices based on price, which might work in the plant-based industry’s favor once their products reach price parity with meat.

In the third experiment, participants could choose one of five grocery store products, including two plant-based options. The researchers again varied the prices of these products to understand how cost affects food choices. Regular meat consumers selected chicken most often (43%), followed by beef (35%), “something else” (18%), and a plant-based item only 4% of the time. This group was willing to pay more for chicken and store-brand beef than the plant-based options. Non-regular meat consumers also selected chicken most often (32%), followed by a plant-based option (28%), beef (25%), and “something else” (15%). This group was willing to pay more for the plant-based items than other meat options. When compared to actual retail prices, both groups over-valued the store-brand beef and under-valued the plant-based items. At their actual retail prices, regular meat consumers selected plant-based options only 2% of the time compared to 25% for non-regular meat consumers. Dropping the price of plant-based items by $1 increased their selection to 5% for regular meat consumers and 31% for non-regular meat consumers.

In the final experiment, participants were given the same five grocery store options but could select multiple items, choosing by the pound. Most participants selected at least one pound of chicken (62%) or store-brand beef (76%). These items were most likely to be purchased as a sole item. The Beyond Meat and Impossible Burger options were purchased 14% and 19% of the time and almost always selected with other items. Regular meat consumers once again proved to be more price-sensitive, with a 1% increase in price leading to an 8.5% decrease in purchases of Beyond Meat and 12% for Impossible Burgers.

Overall, the results suggest that regular meat consumers remain heavily dependent on food prices. Furthermore, the presence of a plant-based option alone may not tempt them to choose it. Unsurprisingly, those identifying as non-regular meat consumers selected plant-based options more frequently, valued them higher, and were less influenced by price. In general, younger consumers, those with a higher household income, parents of children under 12, Democrats, and residents of Western states were more likely to choose plant-based proteins. These demographics may be prime targets for plant-based advocacy campaigns.

The plant-based market is growing, but as this study shows, we have a long road ahead to convince consumers to switch to animal-free alternatives. Based on these findings, we either need cheaper plant-based options or we need to change how plant-based meat is viewed and valued by consumers. Advocates can make a difference by calling for government financial support of plant-based innovations, pushing to end animal agriculture subsidies, and educating consumers about the benefits of reducing their meat intake.

Original source: https://faunalytics.org

 

Ecocide should be a crime, says law professor

Ecocide should be a crime, says law professor

Professor of Law, Phoebe Okowa, has called a proposal to make “ecocide” the fifth international crime, starting a critical debate over the political feasibility of an international environmental crime. 

A law professor from Queen Mary University in London has called a proposal to make “ecocide” the fifth international crime the “most credible and advanced” effort to date to expand the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Phoebe Okowa’s remarks earlier this month at a conference marking the ICC’s 20th anniversary signaled a turning point in which governments, academics and lawyers have begun critically debating the political feasibility of an international environmental crime.

Okowa said the debate could divide developed and developing nations and leave the highest polluting nations, including the United States, China, Russia and India—none of which recognize the court—trying to “immunize” themselves from the court’s jurisdiction.

Okowa spoke during a turbulent moment at the court with human rights advocates and world leaders accusing Russia of war crimes, aggression and crimes against humanity in Ukraine, and climate activists expressing increasing alarm at runaway carbon dioxide emissions, biodiversity loss and worsening pollution.

The momentum behind the movement to add an ecocide crime to the court’s jurisdiction has grown louder in recent years with support from Pope Francis, Dr. Jane Goodall, and U.N Secretary General Antonio Guterres, among others.

While the anniversary event’s speakers, including the court’s prosecutor Karim Khan, focused on how to improve core legal functions, like leveraging technology for evidence collection and analysis, other panelists spoke pointedly about how to expand the court’s reach over its current slate of crimes and potential new crimes. In the past, efforts have been made to add terrorism and transnational drug trafficking to the court’s jurisdiction.

Since the Rome Statute entered into force on July 1, 2002, the court has had jurisdiction over just four crimes: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and aggression, which is waging illegal war (the crime of aggression was added to the Rome Statute in 2010).

Over 20 years, with more than a billion dollars in funding, the court has overseen just 31 cases, with 10 convictions (six of which stemmed from witness tampering in the same case) and three acquittals. Whether that scorecard is evidence of success or failure is a matter of debate. Defendants remain at large in 10 cases while other cases are ongoing. Meanwhile, new investigations have been opened into possible crimes in Ukraine, Venezuela, the Philippines and Georgia. The court’s 2012 conviction of Thomas Lubanga Dylio for war crimes, including enlisting child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, marked a milestone as the court’s first conviction. Lubanga served his 14-year sentence and was released in 2020.

Legal analysts consider the court’s most controversial case to be the conviction, and later acquittal on appeal, of former Congolese Vice President Jean-Pierre Bemba for crimes against humanity and war crimes including rape and murder, committed by troops under Bemba’s command in the Central African Republic. Bemba was later convicted, along with five others, of witness tampering in the case. He was sentenced to one year imprisonment, which he had already served.

Some critics of the court have faulted the institution for taking on too much responsibility, while others have criticized it for doing too little. At the same time, the court has been denounced for pursuing cases in politically weak nations, particularly those in Africa, while others have condemned the court for unfairly pursuing powerful countries. Meanwhile, a 2020 independent review took the court to task for internal operational problems.

Supporters of the court say that despite contradictory demands, the institution has achieved what was once unthinkable—it has held perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity to account, catalyzed criminal justice efforts at the national level and served as a deterrent to war lords, heads of state and other powerful people.

At the anniversary conference, speakers focused on how to steer the court through today’s challenges while maintaining its relevance as the leading institution for justice in the world.

“For all the wonderful work that’s been done, for all the debts we owe to those that have served the court, we must believe that the best days of the court are ahead of us,” Khan, the court’s prosecutor, said. “Because that’s the only hope, indeed that’s the only prayer, if the worst days of humanity are finally to be behind us.”

Towards an Ecocide Crime 

During the last of three panel sessions at the 20th anniversary conference Okowa spoke at length about making ecocide the court’s fifth crime and said “given the times that we’re living,” ecocide would be the “most consequential” if included in the Rome Statute.

Okowa focused her comments on a proposed definition for ecocide that was put forth by an independent expert panel last summer. That panel, convened by the non-governmental organization Stop Ecocide, defined ecocide as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts.”

Okowa, who is a newly elected member of the U.N.’s International Law Commission, offered her own critical analysis of the definition, including potential political sticking points between countries in the Global North and Global South.

“The present environmental crisis has largely been the result…of deliberate and unsustainable patterns of resource use by states in the Global North,” she said. “Some of those states are not parties to the Rome Statute and others may choose not to opt-in and accept the court’s jurisdiction over ecocide.”

Currently, the United States, China, Russia, India and some of the world’s other highest-polluting nations are not members of the court. In the context of climate change, which is just one aspect of mass pollution, the United States is the largest historical emitter with about 20 percent of world emissions. China has now become the leading nation for carbon emissions, with the United States in second place followed by the European Union, Russia and India.

Countries that have contributed little to the world’s pollution crises could be reluctant to bind themselves to rules that top polluting countries evade, Okowa said.

She also said that countries in the Global South might take issue with a new ecocide crime only applying prospectively—thus, prohibiting developing countries from engaging in the same environmentally harmful behaviors that wealthy nations undertook to amass wealth and develop.

“The Global South may be reluctant to push for an ecocide regime in circumstances where those who’ve contributed the most to the current environmental crisis remain essentially unaccountable for their past conduct,” Okowa said.

The potential division between industrialized and developing countries over an ecocide crime is a familiar sticking point in global environmental governance. Similar problems have plagued international climate talks for decades.

In discussions under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, progress has come mainly through voluntary national action with commitments that increase over time, such as in the Paris Agreement. Ratifying an international ecocide crime, on the other hand, would be a binding commitment that cedes an element of national sovereignty to the International Criminal Court—a higher stakes commitment for governments, but not an impossible one.

Those advocating the addition of ecocide as a fifth crime note that world governments mustered the political will 24 years ago to create the International Criminal Court in the wake of large-scale tragedies in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and elsewhere.

Okowa’s remarks on ecocide sparked debate over who the court has jurisdiction over and whether that would need to change should an ecocide crime be added. As written, the Rome Statute only gives the court jurisdiction over individuals. Opinion is split on whether there should be an expansion of the court’s jurisdiction to include the ability to prosecute corporations.

Some lawyers and academics argue that individual responsibility is the strongest of deterrents and would still allow the court’s prosecutor to investigate the actions of corporate officers. But, Okowa pointed out that remedial environmental measures may only be feasible if “corporations are brought into the equation.”

Okowa also expressed concern about the institutional capacity of the International Criminal Court, and of nations which would be required to enact their own ecocide laws, to uniformly and consistently apply an ecocide law to polluting conduct. Those concerns cut straight to heart of why adoption of an ecocide crime is so politically fraught: there is no straightforward or agreed upon answer for how to balance economic development with environmental harm. That issue has been hotly contested for decades.

The independent expert panel’s proposed definition for ecocide contains the term “wanton,” which the panel defined as “reckless disregard for damage which would be clearly excessive in relation to the social and economic benefits anticipated.” Within that definition is an inherent balancing test that would allow judges to weigh environmentally harmful activity against its anticipated “social and economic benefits.”

That aspect of the definition gives judges flexibility and makes the definition adaptable to a changing world. But, as Okawa pointed out, that balancing test could make it difficult to ascertain what exactly constitutes an ecocidal act, leading to a degree of uncertainty.

Okawa concluded by saying her criticisms of the definition were meant to “move the environmental agenda forward” so that others can be “very clear-eyed about what’s possible” and what obstacles stand in the way of adding ecocide to the Rome Statute.

Amending the Rome Statute to add ecocide would first require one of the court’s 123 member counties to formally propose it. Then, a multi-step process would require two-thirds of the court’s members (currently about 82 countries) to approve the amendment. Then, individual countries would have to ratify the new crime at the national level to accept the court’s jurisdiction over ecocide.

Silvia Fernández de Gurmendi, president of the Assembly of States Parties (the legislative body of the court), called the Rome Statute “a living document” and said that “ecocide does deserve a very serious discussion.” But, she said, ultimately it is for nations to decide whether they want to add new crimes through a process that requires “very broad agreement.”

To date, at least 23 countries have discussed the prospect of an ecocide crime, including most recently Kenya, which announced at the U.N. Ocean Conference in June that it was pursuing national legislation that would include “the recognition and protection of defenders of environmental rights, protection of forests and green spaces, recognition of the right to nature and, most importantly, creation of the crime of ecocide.”

Jojo Mehta, the co-founder and executive director of Stop Ecocide, called the ecocide discussion at the anniversary event a sign that the institution has paid close attention to the growing calls for an ecocide crime and is taking those calls very seriously.

“That’s huge,” Mehta said. “If you had asked five years ago whether there were other issues the Rome Statute would address, everyone would have said no. Ecocide has completely changed that conversation.”

Original source: https://insideclimatenews.org

 

New UK “protest limits” aim to silence climate activists

New UK “protest limits” aim to silence climate activists

Protest limits seek to curb free access to protest action for climate activists in the UK, but climate action group Extinction Rebellion is fighting back.

The climate movement Extinction Rebellion on Wednesday revealed plans to bring millions of people into the United Kingdom’s streets on September 10 in response to the government’s latest efforts to enact new limits on protest.

In the Queen’s Speech – which outlines the government’s priorities at the ceremony to open a new session of Parliament – Prince Charles on Tuesday announced the Public Order Bill containing anti-protest measures that the House of Lords last year rejected as “draconian and anti-democratic.”

Charlie Waterhouse of Extinction Rebellion (XR) said in a statement that “it is foolish to think that announcing new curbs in the Queen’s Speech will stop people taking to the streets to demand their government act to ensure a safe future for people in the U.K. and around the world.”

“As we in Extinction Rebellion know full well: what we do works,” he continued. “It’s worked countless times before. It has worked to give us weekends and the vote, human rights, and freedom. And it will work again. Faced with a government incapable of anything other than a desperate attempt to shore up its own power and cover up its criminality it is the only thing we can do. To be a bystander is not enough.”

Waterhouse noted that “w​hen juries are asked to sit in judgment of their peers, they are acquitting. The government’s increasing reliance on private injunctions shows that they know they cannot rely on the courts, because the courts agree with us.”

“So Boris Johnson and Priti Patel, we thank you,” he added, taking aim at the U.K.’s Tory prime minister and home secretary. “Our organizations were set up to break the law to drive positive change. Your actions show that we are winning.”

Plans to take to the streets in opposition to the looming anti-protest measures—which clearly target not only Extinction Rebellion but also Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil (JSO)—follow a wave of climate actions in the U.K. and around the world last month.

The actions in April included XR members blocking multiple London bridges, scientists gluing climate research and their own hands to the windows of a U.K. government building, and Just Stop Oil campaigners shutting down terminals across the United Kingdom.

XR’s Wednesday statement highlighted YouGov polling from April which showed that 58% of U.K. adults support the demands of Just Stop Oil, with just 23% opposed and 19% neutral, and in a three-week period, the number of respondents who said they are likely to engage in some form of climate action over the next year jumped from 8.7% to 11.3%—an increase of approximately 1.7 million people

The Guardian reported Tuesday that the anti-protest measures include:

  • New criminal offenses of locking on, and going equipped to lock on to others, objects, or buildings—carrying a maximum penalty of six months’ imprisonment and an unlimited fine;
  • The creation of a new criminal offense of interfering with key national infrastructure, such as airports, railways, and printing presses—carrying a maximum sentence of 12 months in prison and an unlimited fine; and
  • Measures to make it illegal to obstruct major transport works, including disrupting the construction or maintenance of projects like HS2—punishable by up to six months in prison and an unlimited fine.

“The bill is expected to extend stop and search powers so the police can seize articles related to these new offenses,” the newspaper noted. “New preventive ‘serious disruption prevention orders’ will also be available for repeat offenders.”

XR wasn’t alone in responding with alarm to the anti-protest measures and other priorities addressed in the speech, including repealing the Human Rights Act and replacing it with a narrower Bill of Rights. “This highly regressive legislative agenda represents a systematic gutting of key legal protections for ordinary people,” Amnesty International U.K. CEO Sacha Deshmukh said broadly before blasting the Public Order Bill. “It’s frightening to see the home secretary demonizing people who are simply exercising their right to peaceful protest. These authoritarian provisions, recently removed by the Lords from the policing bill, are similar to repressive policies in countries the U.K. regularly criticizes – including Russia, Hong Kong, and Belarus,” Deshmukh added. “It follows a pattern of a government voicing support for protest around the world but cracking down on the right to speak up here at home.”

Sam Grant, head of policy and campaigns at the human rights group Liberty, said Tuesday that “these rehashed measures to crack down on protest in today’s Queen’s speech are yet another power grab from a government determined to shut down accountability.”

“Protest is a right, not a gift from the state – and measures like these are designed to stop ordinary people making their voices heard,” the campaigner continued. “Parliamentarians and the general public rejected these dangerous measures when they were first rushed through in the policing bill, but the government has refused to listen.

“From restrictions on protest to scrapping the Human Rights Act,” Grant warned, “this is all part of the government’s continued attempts to rewrite the rules so only they can win, and prevent ordinary people from having their say.”

Original source: https://www.commondreams.org

 

Is our food system sustaining us or draining us?

Is our food system sustaining us or draining us?

The way in which we grow and consume food is not sustainable for the planet and for human society. It is time for a meaningful change.

The pandemic has exposed what scientists have long been warning about – our global food supply is so broken, disconnected, and insufficient that drastic changes must be made in order to feed the world healthily and sustainably.

The global food supply chain was among the hardest hit amidst the coronavirus pandemic with 265 million people possibly facing starvation to closed meat plants causing empty supermarket shelves. Here are 10 things that the coronavirus has shed light on.

1. Commercially grown food isn’t easily repurposed

Food that is grown for food service is currently being thrown away, as global F&B businesses continue to be shuttered as a part of coronavirus containment measures. While some may wonder why they aren’t just being transferred to retail – social media has been flooded with images of empty supermarket shelves – it’s an entirely different system to repurpose commercially grown crops that were originally destined for wholesale into prepared and packaged products. And getting it shipped on trucks to grocery stores is another step in the process that is difficult to organise, not to mention expensive. So instead, farmers are now being forced to dispose of millions of pounds of fresh vegetables and fruit into fields and landfills – all the while the World Food Programme warns of widespread famines of “Biblical proportions” in a recent report.

2. Livestock workers are especially vulnerable to illness

What the collapse of the US meat supply chain revealed is the inherent dangers of work in the animal meat industry. Processors and manufacturers were prompted to shut down due to a labour shortage caused by rapid outbreaks of Covid-19 amongst employees in 2020 and 2021, who are at greater risk of contracting the disease due to the nature of the work itself, working in close proximity on the job, and low wages that tend to mean living in cramped quarters. We can see similar outbreaks in other poorly paid jobs that mostly employ marginalised communities, such amongst Singapore’s migrant worker population that bore the brunt of the cases in the city-state.

3. Food and farm workers work in inhumane conditions

From meat packers to fishermen and agricultural farm workers, the pandemic has hailed these food and farm workers as “heroic essential workers” that are keeping the critical food supply chain going. However, they continue to lack the very basic protections they deserve to ensure their workplace safety. Many relief measures and stimulus packages excluded food workers, which left many in the sector without any basic personal protective equipment such as face masks and hand sanitisers whilst their working conditions mean that physical distancing is impossible. But putting food and farm workers at greater risk of infection doesn’t just jeopardise their lives and safety – it is threatening food security as a whole and factory worker outbreaks have pushed meat supply chain to breaking point. It is clear that these inhumane conditions and practices must come to an end if we are to ensure the health of the entire food system.

4. Farmers don’t make enough money

On top of this, farmers and food workers tend to continue dangerous work because they have to face an agonising choice between staying at home and going for weeks, potentially months, with no income. Or they can continue working, getting paid around 15 cents on the dollar, and risk infection – no pay for sick leave, no extra pay for hazardous working conditions. Incredibly poorly paid work perpetuates the problem – while they uphold critical food supply chains, the sector employs mainly people from marginalised communities who tend to work in cramped spaces where the chances of spread of the disease are much higher and have little access to affordable healthcare.

5. We are too dependent on carbon-intensive meat

Meat is one of the industries hardest hit by the pandemic, with Tyson Foods’ CEO warning that the meat supply chain is “breaking”. As it so happens, animal-based products are some of the most carbon intensive in the world. Figures from the UN show the animal agriculture industry generates around 18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions – more than all transportation combined – and uses around 70 percent of arable land, in the process driving destructive practices such as deliberate deforestation, as well as contributing to biodiversity loss and water pollution. Scientists have reiterated time and time again that in order to avoid total climate collapse, we need to shift to a plant-centric food system. The industry that we are over-reliant on for the world’s source of protein is breaking, and is the very industry that is driving our climate and ecological emergency.

6. Carbon-intensive industrial meat is driving disease

Industrial meat isn’t just driving the climate crisis, it is one of the root causes of disease outbreaks. The world’s top biodiversity and wildlife experts have recently said that it is the combination of “rampant deforestation, uncontrolled expansion of agriculture, intensive farming, mining and infrastructure development, as well as the exploitation of wild species have created a ‘perfect storm’ for the spillover of diseases.” It is all these anthropogenic activities – particularly animal agriculture that has fuelled deforestation and mass biodiversity loss, which we saw earlier happen in the 2019 Amazon rainforest fires, that has increased the risk of zoonotic disease outbreaks. Our ever-rising contact with animals over the years has meant that 70 percent of all emerging human diseases now come from them. If there’s one thing to learn from the current Covid-19 pandemic, it is that we have to change the way our food system produces protein.

7. We rely too much on food imports

In the past years, trade and globalisation has meant that the food trade is more diverse and expansive than ever before. Proteins, produce and grains in one end of the planet can end up in another in a matter of days. But this increased reliance on international trade for our food supply has dramatically decreased countries’ resilience to external shocks such as export bans and interruptions, which we’re currently seeing due to the coronavirus. Places like Singapore and Hong Kong are especially vulnerable as our food supply chain essentially places “all eggs in one basket” with over 90 percent of food being imported, and now tariffs and travel restrictions are raising concerns about food shortages and price spikes.

8. Investing in urban farms is vital

Coronavirus has shown how inefficient shipping staple fresh produce across thousands of miles from one continent to another. Singapore has quickly realised the need to pivot, and has recently launched a new S$30 million (US$21 million) fund to boost local food production by turning rooftop car parks into urban farms and supporting vertical hydroponic farms. More cities need to start ramping up self-sufficiency by investing in urban farms for locally produced foods that can weather external shocks – whether it be shocks caused by pandemics like the coronavirus or climate-related disasters.

9. We’re wasting a third of all food produced

We still haven’t solved the issue of global hunger, and this issue is getting even more severe due to the Covid-19 crisis, with at least 265 million people being pushed to the brink of starvation, which is double the number of people who were already under threat prior to the pandemic. Yet we waste 30 percent of all food produced – a number that is likely to be far higher now as farm workers and food manufacturers, as mentioned previously, are having to throw away fresh produce and cull millions of livestock animals due to lockdowns, infection outbreaks and travel restrictions. Food that doesn’t get eaten also represents a massive source of waste – land, water, energy, soil, seeds – all of which contributes at least 10% of global carbon emissions that is accelerating the rate of global heating. The world will need to battle a population of 10 billion by 2050 in a climate-stricken planet – and the coronavirus pandemic is exposing the need to solve these interconnected issues of hunger and food waste.

10. Restaurants have been struggling for a long time, even before coronavirus

Restaurants had been having trouble making money before the pandemic struck. In an op-ed published in the New York Times, renowned chef Gabrielle Hamilton detailed the heartbreaking experience of having to close down her bistro Prune. “The coronavirus did not suddenly shine light on an unknown fragility. We’ve all known, and for a rather long time,” she wrote, referring to the difficulty for the industry to grapple with the market’s demanding “grow or go” tactics, ever-rising costs and the takeover of delivery firms. Restaurants simply weren’t succeeding anymore, they were barely surviving. Owner-chefs who are looking to offer good, honest food in a warm environment can barely make ends meet. The only F&B winners in this margin killing industry are large chains. Is this the food landscape we want?

Original source: https://www.greenqueen.com

 

To Protect Humans We Must Protect Animals & the Environment

To Protect Humans We Must Protect Animals & the Environment

The health of human populations is inextricably linked to the wellbeing of animals and natural habitats. To prevent disease, we must have a holistic view.

There are many ways in which these areas are interconnected, from the overuse of antibiotics on farm animals leaving us more vulnerable to superbugs, to climate change giving diseases new opportunities to spread or the need to maintain balanced and viable ecosystems to protect our health.

WHAT IS ONE HEALTH?

“A One Health approach is where people in human, animal and environmental health sectors are working together to find solutions that optimise the health of all sectors,” says Dr Trish Campbell, Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne and Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity.

“It can be the sharing of data and knowledge or sharing of resources,” she says.

A current example of One Health is veterinary epidemiologists studying animal diseases who are working with the Department of Health to support the COVID-19 response.

For some time, there has been an increased focus on One Health approaches to public health.

Outbreaks like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003, Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) in 2012 and recurring outbreaks of Ebola, as well as epidemics of influenza and concerns for food safety, have led to greater cross-disciplinary collaboration.

WATCH: Professor Kanta Subbarao on COVID-19, related viruses and One Health. Video: University of Melbourne

SARS and MERS, like COVID-19, are zoonotic diseases – infectious diseases transmitted from animals to humans. Both originated in bats, with SARS passing from civet cats to humans, and MERS from camels to humans.

It’s currently thought that COVID-19 also originated in bats and passed to humans through another animal, but it is not yet known which animal served as the intermediary.

In a recent interview, Professor Kanta Subbarao, Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Influenza at the Doherty Institute, said: “There is an enormous reservoir of pathogens in animal hosts, and if we take away their habitats and live in much closer proximity, that’s a problem.”

With emerging infectious diseases on the rise and over 60 per cent originating in animals, a One Health approach is important to prevent and respond to future outbreaks.

A DIFFERENT APPROACH

Dr Campbell’s research involves modelling and analysing infectious diseases to understand what is likely to happen if control measures like vaccinations are introduced.

This requires examination of potential spread caused by the interaction of human, animal and environmental factors.

“I’m trying to capture the underlying mechanisms that spread disease, and these can come from any of the three sectors. We don’t need to build all into every model, but some diseases require a One Health approach,” says Dr Campbell.

Dr Richard Bradhurst, a Research Fellow at the Centre of Excellence for Biosecurity Risk Analysis, develops epidemiological models to address the spread and control of disease in livestock.

The centrepiece of his work is the Australian Animal Disease Spread model (AADIS), developed with the Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment.

AADIS has been used to study foot-and-mouth disease, invasive environmental pests and insect vector-borne viruses and is being adapted for African swine fever.

“The epidemiological interface between animals and humans is complex and sometimes unpredictable, and this can be challenging for scientists and policymakers,” says Dr Bradhurst.

“While my focus is animal health, the AADIS model switches from simulating disease in livestock to disease in humans to environmental pests by changing the underlying data and configuration files.”

ADDRESSING VECTOR-BORNE DISEASES

Many diseases are spread from animals to humans by blood-sucking insects like flies, mosquitoes and ticks. This accounts for over 17 per cent of all infectious diseases in humans, causing over 700 000 deaths annually.

Professor John Fazakerley, Dean of the Faculty of Veterinary and Agricultural Sciences and Professor of Virology at the Doherty Institute, researches infectious diseases transmitted by mosquitoes and ticks.

“When we have heavy rains, which we’re going to have more frequently as adverse weather events increase with our changing climate, we will have more floods and higher mosquito populations,” says Professor Fazakerley.

“Large mosquito populations in South Eastern Australia generally result in increased cases of Ross River fever, because mosquitoes spread the virus from kangaroos and wallabies.”

This shows how environmental changes can contribute to disease spread.

“Another thing that is promoting the transfer of infectious diseases is the loss of habitat. This forces animals to move into different ecological niches which may move infectious diseases around between animals and between animals and humans,” says Professor Fazakerley.

“Climate change and forestry clearance for agriculture are causes of that, but humans are also encroaching on animals’ territories because cities are ever-expanding.”

Another important factor is globalisation and the resulting increase in trade.

The spread of the Asian tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus), has contributed to the transmission of diseases from animals to humans, including dengue fever and chikungunya.

“The mosquito vectors of these diseases have been spread by mosquito eggs laid in lucky bamboo plants or used tyres that are moved around the world,” says Professor Fazakerley.

“There are clear implications for human health if zoonotic and vector-borne diseases are misunderstood as a result of not adopting a One Health approach,” says Dr Bradhurst.

THE IMPORTANCE OF AN INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACH

“There may be even greater consequences if scientists and policymakers do not have a holistic outlook that takes into account human, animal and plant health, and the environment.”

“We’d be well advised to understand these diseases, what the ecosystem drivers of their emergence or re-emergence are, where they are most likely to come from, how they are transmitted and how they can be prevented,” says Professor Fazakerley.

“The more that I learn in this field, the more I realise that all of the systems on our planet are interconnected and we don’t necessarily understand how all those links work,” says Dr Campbell.

“If we don’t take an interdisciplinary approach, we might meet the aims of one sector at the expense of another, and that can, in turn, end up being harmful to all.”

Professor Fazakerley is developing a One Health strategy with a broad, cross-discipline approach, and Dr Campbell has been involved in the co-creation of two undergraduate breadth subjects called ‘Our Planet, Our Health’.

“Guest lecturers talk about topics including mosquitoes, poultry systems, dairy farming, multi-species care and Indigenous knowledge,” says Dr Campbell.

“We’ve taken a One Health approach to educate the next generation.”

Original source: https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au

Chinese Plant-Based Company Educating Consumers “One Stomach At A Time”

Chinese Plant-Based Company Educating Consumers “One Stomach At A Time”

How a Chinese plant-based protein start-up is going back to basics and educating consumers “one stomach at a time”. 

Franklin Yao (43) was sitting in New York, in July 2019, biting into an Impossible Burger, which got him thinking that “someone is going to do this for China with pork instead of beef– for Chinese food – and that person might as well be me.” Less than a year later, in April 2020, I was sitting across from him in Shanghai to find out how he turned that inspiration into reality. Franklin founded Z-Rou Meat 株肉, a plant-based protein brand that is proudly made in China, less than a year ago with the launch of its first products: minced and ground ‘pork.’

Franklin describes himself as “overseas Chinese” and is the embodiment of everything that entails. He was born in Toronto, to Chinese parents, and has lived half his life so far in North America and the other in China. His Chinese heritage is a source of pride and “part of this ethos.” This deeply rooted connection to China was an important factor in the creation of Z-Rou’s ground ‘pork’ product. Franklin set out to create a plant-based protein product that was not only better for the environment but was also suitable for cooking traditional Chinese dishes. Happy memories play across his face as Franklin recounts the experience of tasting traditional Chinese food in his youth.

“There is so much sense memory of dishes that can be created out of this [product]. I am not serving some kind of future food. I am allowing you to eat things like my mother’s [recipes]. You just replace the ground pork with Z-Rou to get the same dish, and the same sense of nostalgia.” – Franklin Yao

Franklin sees the plant-based food market as an opportunity for Chinese brands to make their mark and produce products that are globally recognised. He said “a consumer protein that is more efficient, safe, healthy and humane is a new category, a new way of thinking of food. So this is an opportunity for Chinese brands to emerge.” In what Franklin referred to as the previous “40-year cycle”, the traditional view was that profit maximisation and sustainable business practices are mutually exclusive. That thinking is shifting and Franklin believes that “business and good are now fundamentally intertwined” making it increasingly difficult to “build businesses that are just based on profit-seeking.” With a company like Z-Rou, Franklin and his partners are trying to “arbitrage good.”

“We are trying to build a company with a DNA that is trying to do more good right from the very beginning and that will attract customers that want to be part of this ethos or community of what we are trying to do.”

Taking the “proudly Chinese” label seriously, the ingredients in Z-Rou’s products are sourced from across China: soy protein from Northeast China, coconut oil is from Hainan, konjac is from Hubei and shitake mushrooms from Fujian. The choice of konjac increases the nutritional benefits of Z-Rou. This starchy tuber is a superfood with an edible corm that is a rich source of fiber. When comparing Z-Rou to pork, Franklin points out, “real pork doesn’t have fiber. The fiber in konjac allows us to make a product that has 62{85424e366b324f7465dc80d56c21055464082cc00b76c51558805a981c8fcd63} fewer calories than actual ground pork.” The reason for making a pork substitute is due to the widespread use of pork in Chinese cuisine.

“I can’t beat pork in terms of what pork is, but I can beat it if you look at a balanced scorecard. You won’t get the exact same oiliness or fattiness, and although we’ll get better at it, I don’t think that is the goal. We have to balance the product based on nutritional content and how it is created.”

Critics take issue with plant-based proteins for being processed. Franklin counters this with a powerful perspective saying, “there is nothing natural about the way that pigs are raised as you are literally processing a living being.” In comparison “we take protein out of the soybean and just essentially mix it with other ingredients in a way to allow it to function” as a ground or minced pork substitute.

Animal proteins are linked to an increased risk of cancerous cells and other health issues. Plant-based proteins offer a healthier alternative, which is simultaneously better for the environment and more humane. We often consume food without thinking of its origins or benefits but Franklin thinks that “food tastes much more delicious in context.” When you know that what you are eating is healthier, more sustainable, and humane, then it is more enjoyable. However, he cautions against over telling the story. Ultimately, the food still has to be presented well and taste good. He believes that “We really have to start with the food. Then the education and the context and all these things build up, rather than the reverse.”

Franklin’s relationship with food can be accredited to his practice of Buddhism. He started with meditation, which he humorously describes as a “gateway drug” to Buddhism. His immersion in Buddhism taught him mindfulness. He now applies mindfulness to what he eats and channelled it into the creation of Z-Rou products. Franklin admits, “I was willfully ignorant around issues with meat. It is only through meditation and Buddhism, talking to Buddhists and learning from them that I started to understand some of these issues.”

Throughout the interview, it is clear that Franklin practices mindfulness, his responses were measured and thoughtful without having an air of being rehearsed. Franklin believes that “most of the time we are mindlessly eating” and that “we need to become better educated and mindful about some of these decisions” we make about what we eat. And this is what Z-Rou is trying to do with plant-based meat. The company also has a digital magazine called Own What You Eat that addresses the complexities behind our consumption.

Franklin points to the “correlation between education and eating meat.” He says that the more you know the less you eat.” Z-Rou’s target market is people “that are curious, that are already demanding this product, that tend to be affluent, and tend to be better educated.” Z- Rou does not aim to kick-down doors and convert people to veganism overnight, but to find accessible markets and educate customers that already like the product.

Meat consumption is often seen as a sign of affluence in China, which is often imputed as the reason why vegetarianism and veganism won’t flourish there. That doesn’t deter Franklin, who believes that the high levels of meat consumption in China are part of a 40- year cycle. What goes up must come down: “You think meat can be dramatically reduced, well it dramatically increased.” Franklin commented.

As a way to introduce the Z-Rou Meat product into the market, the company has partnered with a number of well-known and highly regarded restaurants in Shanghai restaurants. Franklin explained that they wanted to “introduce it in the right context.” He emphasised the relationships between Z-Rou and the restaurants are intended as a sustainable long- term relationship, where the Z-Rou product finds a permanent place on the menus.

Currently, the majority of the Z-Rou partner restaurants serve Western cuisine and Franklin recognises that they “need to do more” to get the product into local restaurants because “it is a Chinese product.” But he emphasised that they don’t want to do too much too quickly in accordance with their one stomach at a time philosophy: “One stomach at a time, one kitchen at a time, one restaurant chain at a time.”

While Franklin has global aspirations for the company, he is very adamant that he doesn’t want to spread Z-Rou Meat too thin and is focused on developing the brand in China first. Franklin describes the company’s identity as “a small, high-quality purveyor of this category. We have a very specific product; we are artisan in some ways. We are small and local. And we just go from there.”

So what sets Z-Rou Meat apart from the other players in the domestic and global plant- based meat industry? As a plant-based ground pork product, it lends itself to culinary creativity. In contrast, the pre-made patties and meatballs that other plant-based protein companies produce can be limiting and “disempowering for the chefs who can only heat it and add sauce.” While Franklin’s background is not in the food and beverage industry, it is evident from the way he talks about our relationship with food and the importance of taste and context of food how much he cares.

The second thing that sets them apart is their “one stomach at a time strategy”. They are not trying to convert everyone, but rather target a very specific audience. Companies such as Beyond Meat, who has recently signed a co-operation agreement with Starbucks in China, have the resources to educate, convert, and target Generation-Z en masse. While Z-Rou does ultimately want to influence Generation Z it is not their first step. “Part of the reason we are called it Z-Rou is because there is a Generation-Z component to it, ultimately we want to change their eating behaviour, I just don’t think that that generation is the first generation we should be targeting because you have to kick-down that door. The more people that we serve in those other groups, Z-Gen people surround them, and they influence Z-Gen people, and some of them are Z-gen people. That is the way we are going to get to that generation,” Franklin explained.

In the current climate, one cannot avoid discussing the impact of the COVID-19 and the resulting lock-down in China. Many companies were forced to go into hibernation during this time, but Z-Rou responded to the situation by building relationships and networks. Z-Rou also moved up business-to-consumer marketing by launching the Home Chef Challenge in Shanghai. Potential customers that signed up received complimentary packs of Z-Rou ground and minced products. By sharing photos of their Z-Rou home creations, participants were eligible for multiple prizes. The initial goal was to sign up 150
participants, but the final count was eight times that. Next up, the Home Chef Challenge will move on to Wuhan and Beijing.

When asked what the impact of COVID-19 on the plant-based protein industry has been, Franklin was reluctant to make any conclusive remarks but said that anecdotally speaking, people have reached out and said, “okay now I see what you are trying to do”. He was surprised that even people that he believed to be furthest away from Z-Rou’s target market have said “hey, you are on to something here”’ “.

The plant-based protein industry is predicted to grow 14{85424e366b324f7465dc80d56c21055464082cc00b76c51558805a981c8fcd63} CAGR over the next 5 years and Franklin believes that “that 14{85424e366b324f7465dc80d56c21055464082cc00b76c51558805a981c8fcd63} is going to be filled by the new players, like us.” While he expressed admiration for certain companies that have grown extremely fast, he is implementing a more step-by-step growth strategy for Z-Rou as he believes that “sometimes when you are executing very fast you don’t think about what you are executing”.

Franklin made the differentiation between fast food versus slow food and said, “The consumers that understand our product are more likely to be slow food eaters rather than fast food eaters, that is maybe the fundamental difference.” Z-Rou focuses on the taste, creativity, and presentation of the food in addition to the context of where it comes from. When asked if this approach will be successful, Franklin replied, “Fundamentally, I still think that what is real is what goes into your stomach. And if this doesn’t work then I was wrong about food.”

10 Ways COVID-19 Helped Us See the Cracks in Our Food System

10 Ways COVID-19 Helped Us See the Cracks in Our Food System

The pandemic has shone a light on the ways in which our food system is unsustainable, and abusive towards humans & animals.

Recent news about the global food supply chain amidst the coronavirus pandemic has shocked much of the world, from 265 million people possibly facing starvation to closed meat plants causing empty supermarket shelves. But what the pandemic has exposed about the food system is what scientists have long been warning – our global food supply is so broken, disconnected and insufficient that drastic changes must be made in order to feed the world healthily and sustainably. Here are 10 things that the coronavirus has shed light on.

1. Commercially grown food isn’t easily repurposed

Food that is grown for food service is currently being thrown away, as global F&B businesses continue to be shuttered as a part of coronavirus containment measures. While some may wonder why they aren’t just being transferred to retail – social media has been flooded with images of empty supermarket shelves – it’s an entirely different system to repurpose commercially grown crops that were originally destined for wholesale into prepared and packaged products. And getting it shipped on trucks to grocery stores is another step in the process that is difficult to organise, not to mention expensive. So instead, farmers are now being forced to dispose of millions of pounds of fresh vegetables and fruit into fields and landfills – all the while the World Food Programme warns of widespread famines of “Biblical proportions” in its latest report.

thrown away produce Lynne SladkyAssociated Press
Source: Lynne Sladky / Associated Press

2. Livestock workers are especially vulnerable to Covid-19

What the collapse of the US meat supply chain has revealed is the inherent dangers of work in the animal meat industry. Processors and manufacturers have been prompted to shut down due to a labour shortage caused by rapid outbreaks of Covid-19 amongst employees, who are at greater risk of contracting the disease due to the nature of the work itself, working in close proximity on the job, and low wages that tend to mean living in cramped quarters. We can see similar outbreaks in other poorly paid jobs that mostly employ marginalised communities, such amongst Singapore’s migrant worker population that have borne the brunt of the cases in the city-state.

3. Food and farm workers work in inhumane conditions

From meat packers to fishermen and agricultural farm workers, the pandemic has hailed these food and farm workers as “heroic essential workers” that are keeping the critical food supply chain going. However, they continue to lack the very basic protections they deserve to ensure their workplace safety. Many relief measures and stimulus packages have excluded food workers, leaving many in the sector without any basic personal protective equipment such as face masks and hand sanitisers whilst their working conditions mean that physical distancing is impossible. But putting food and farm workers at greater risk of infection doesn’t just jeopardise their lives and safety – it is threatening food security as a whole and factory worker outbreaks have pushed meat supply chain to breaking point. It is clear that these inhumane conditions and practices must come to an end if we are to ensure the health of the entire food system.

4. Farmers don’t make enough money

On top of this, farmers and food workers tend to continue dangerous work because they have to face an agonising choice between staying at home and going for weeks, potentially months, with no income. Or they can continue working, getting paid around 15 cents on the dollar, and risk infection – no pay for sick leave, no extra pay for hazardous working conditions. Incredibly poorly paid work perpetuates the problem – while they uphold critical food supply chains, the sector employs mainly people from marginalised communities who tend to work in cramped spaces where the chances of spread of the disease are much higher and have little access to affordable healthcare.

farm worker JOE RAEDLEGETTY IMAGES
Source: Joe Raedle / Getty Images

5. We are too dependent on carbon-intensive meat

Meat is one of the industries hardest hit by the pandemic, with Tyson Foods’ CEO warning that the meat supply chain is “breaking”. As it so happens, animal-based products are some of the most carbon intensive in the world. Figures from the UN show the animal agriculture industry generates around 18{85424e366b324f7465dc80d56c21055464082cc00b76c51558805a981c8fcd63} of global greenhouse gas emissions – more than all transportation combined – and uses around 70{85424e366b324f7465dc80d56c21055464082cc00b76c51558805a981c8fcd63} of arable land, in the process driving destructive practices such as deliberate deforestation, as well as contributing to biodiversity loss and water pollution. Scientists have reiterated time and time again that in order to avoid total climate collapse, we need to shift to a plant-centric food system. The industry that we are over-reliant on for the world’s source of protein is breaking, and is the very industry that is driving our climate and ecological emergency.

6. Carbon-intensive industrial meat is driving disease

Industrial meat isn’t just driving the climate crisis, it is one of the root causes of disease outbreaks. The world’s top biodiversity and wildlife experts have recently said that it is the combination of “rampant deforestation, uncontrolled expansion of agriculture, intensive farming, mining and infrastructure development, as well as the exploitation of wild species have created a ‘perfect storm’ for the spillover of diseases.” It is all these anthropogenic activities – particularly animal agriculture that has fuelled deforestation and mass biodiversity loss, which we saw earlier happen in the 2019 Amazon rainforest fires, that has increased the risk of zoonotic disease outbreaks. Our ever-rising contact with animals over the years has meant that 70{85424e366b324f7465dc80d56c21055464082cc00b76c51558805a981c8fcd63} of all emerging human diseases now come from them. If there’s one thing to learn from the current Covid-19 pandemic, it is that we have to change the way our food system produces protein.

factory farming dreamstime
Source: Dreamstime

7. We rely too much on food imports

In the past years, trade and globalisation has meant that the food trade is more diverse and expansive than ever before. Proteins, produce and grains in one end of the planet can end up in another in a matter of days. But this increased reliance on international trade for our food supply has dramatically decreased countries’ resilience to external shocks such as export bans and interruptions, which we’re currently seeing due to the coronavirus. Places like Singapore and Hong Kong are especially vulnerable as our food supply chain essentially places “all eggs in one basket” with over 90{85424e366b324f7465dc80d56c21055464082cc00b76c51558805a981c8fcd63} of food being imported, and now tariffs and travel restrictions are raising concerns about food shortages and price spikes.

8. Investing in urban farms is vital

Coronavirus has shown how inefficient shipping staple fresh produce across thousands of miles from one continent to another. Singapore has quickly realised the need to pivot, and has recently launched a new S$30 million (US$21 million) fund to boost local food production by turning rooftop car parks into urban farms and supporting vertical hydroponic farms. More cities need to start ramping up self-sufficiency by investing in urban farms for locally produced foods that can weather external shocks – whether it be shocks caused by pandemics like the coronavirus or climate-related disasters.

9. We’re wasting a third of all food produced

We still haven’t solved the issue of global hunger, and this issue is getting even more severe due to the Covid-19 crisis, with at least 265 million people being pushed to the brink of starvation, which is double the number of people who were already under threat prior to the pandemic. Yet we waste 30{85424e366b324f7465dc80d56c21055464082cc00b76c51558805a981c8fcd63} of all food produced – a number that is likely to be far higher now as farm workers and food manufacturers, as mentioned previously, are having to throw away fresh produce and cull millions of livestock animals due to lockdowns, infection outbreaks and travel restrictions. Food that doesn’t get eaten also represents a massive source of waste – land, water, energy, soil, seeds – all of which contributes at least 10{85424e366b324f7465dc80d56c21055464082cc00b76c51558805a981c8fcd63} of global carbon emissions that is accelerating the rate of global heating. The world will need to battle a population of 10 billion by 2050 in a climate-stricken planet – and the coronavirus pandemic is exposing the need to solve these interconnected issues of hunger and food waste.

food waste shutterstock 1
Source: Shutterstock

10. Restaurants have been struggling for a long time, even before coronavirus

Restaurants had been having trouble making money before the pandemic struck. In an op-ed published in the New York Times, renowned chef Gabrielle Hamilton detailed the heartbreaking experience of having to close down her bistro Prune. “The coronavirus did not suddenly shine light on an unknown fragility. We’ve all known, and for a rather long time,” she wrote, referring to the difficulty for the industry to grapple with the market’s demanding “grow or go” tactics, ever-rising costs and the takeover of delivery firms. Restaurants simply weren’t succeeding anymore, they were barely surviving. Owner-chefs who are looking to offer good, honest food in a warm environment can barely make ends meet. The only F&B winners in this margin killing industry are large chains. Is this the food landscape we want?

Original source: https://www.greenqueen.com

The Cost of Efficiency – Is Our Food System Doing More Harm Than Good?

The Cost of Efficiency – Is Our Food System Doing More Harm Than Good?

Consider the appalling animals abuse, destruction of natural habitats and grim prospects for our health. Intensive agriculture is a seemingly broken system.

Food is big business. Multinational corporations oversee vast production facilities, churning out incredible amounts of food for an ever-growing population, and amassing tremendous profits all the while. Demand for cheaper food, in greater volumes, and with lower production costs are among the confluence of factors that have fuelled the rise of a system of intensive agriculture that dominates much of the world today. But this isn’t how it once was, and it shouldn’t be assumed that intensive farming is the only way to go – or that it is even a way we should go. This article will explore what this farming method really is, what the implications are, and how to evolve beyond it.

What Is Intensive And Extensive Agriculture?

Intensive and extensive agriculture stands in opposition to one another in many ways. Extensive farming refers to systems that use relatively small amounts of inputs, such as human labor, machinery such as tractors, and investment. Fewer inputs are needed to produce yields, since extensive agriculture tends to make use of naturally-occurring resources, such as fertile soil. Pastoral production, where animals are grazed outdoors for their entire lives or are tended to by nomadic farmers – is a type of extensive agriculture, as are operations that favor greater plant and crop diversity.

Now picture a vast, windowless shed crammed with 20,000 chickens, and you will have an image of what intensive agriculture is all about. Gaining popularity in the 20th century, boosted by neoliberal policies particularly in countries like the United States, intensive agriculture has been gradually overtaking more traditional farming methods. Intensive agriculture produces much higher yields per unit of land, requiring land modifications such as clearing forests and relying on huge amounts of inputs, which can include things like fertilizers, chemical pesticides and some might say a great deal of cruelty, particularly when it comes to animal operations.

Types Of Intensive Farming

Intensive farming can be non-industrial, in which human labor is still a significant factor in achieving high yields, or industrial, meaning operations that are largely mechanized. Because of its prevalence within North America, industrial intensive farming will be the focus of this article.

cows intensive agriculture

Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals

Livestock

The term livestock refers to those individual animals who have no choice but to endure life on farms. Intensive livestock farming takes place within Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, also known as factory farms, and unfortunately, these are places of great tragedy. Species such as cows, pigs, chickens, and sheep are the usual targets for intensive operations, where they are bred, born, and forced to live drastically shortened lifespans in crowded, highly constrained, and often filthy environments, with many species kept indoors their entire lives. Antibiotics are generally administered to animals throughout their lives in order to stave off diseases to which their chronically-suppressed immune systems would otherwise succumb.

On factory farms in North America, livestock production has become increasingly efficient, with milk production having doubled since 1960, meat production tripled, and egg production quadrupled. This efficiency comes at the expense of the animals and the environment, while few welfare regulations stand in the way.

Crops

Monocropping is a defining feature of intensive plant agriculture. Large areas of land are planted with a single species, such as wheat, corn, or soy, with the latter two used heavily in animal feed. The use of synthetic fertilizers allow crops to be grown year after year on soil that becomes more depleted as time goes on; because time is money, fields are not allowed to go fallow, which would allow the soil to naturally replenish the nutrients plants require.

Pesticides are applied liberally, and genetic engineering is also common, where certain traits are cultivated within seeds such as antibiotic or pesticide resistance, and greater yield capabilities. Agriculture corporations acquire patents for genetically modified seeds, with the largest collection belonging to Bayer after it was acquired by Monsanto.

Aquaculture

Aquaculture involves the farming of marine animals including fish, algae, and other organisms  – even octopus are being considered for intensive farming. These CAFOs can be located in both marine and freshwater environments. Particularly within fish aquaculture operations that are located in bays or estuaries in the ocean, risks of environmental pollution, and the spread of disease such as sea lice to wild populations is a serious concern.

Sustainability

Intensive agriculture has long been touted as a way – and often the only way – to feed growing populations around the globe. Talks of improving “environmental performance” abound as solutions are sought to continue intensive farming. However, one of the most effective and immediate steps that can be taken towards sustainability is for people to curtail the consumption of animal products since these are the most polluting, resource-intensive, and cruelest forms of agriculture. Particularly those in wealthy nations like the United States and New Zealand –  two of the highest per-capita consumers of meat – ought to decrease animal product consumption, since consuming animal products can produce negative health outcomes like cardiovascular disease.

What Is An Example Of Intensive Agriculture?

pigs intensive agriculture

Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals

Industrial hog farms can be some of the most heartbreaking, yet also typical, examples of the lengths intensive agriculture will go to produce high yields with minimal investment. Female pigs, called breeding sows, are forcibly impregnated and held in gestation crates, which are metal cages not much bigger than their own bodies. Sows cannot wander anywhere, forever denied the feeling of the grass beneath their feet or sun on their skin. They aren’t able to even turn around for the majority of their lives. After giving birth, they are transferred to farrowing crates that allow the young to suckle, but no other contact with the mother is permitted. The design of these cages means she cannot even bend around to look at her own infants.

After about 17 days, these young are sent to crammed indoor sheds to be fattened up, then sent for slaughter after only 6 months. In the wild, pigs can live upwards of 20 years. Intensive agriculture aims to grow animals as fast as possible in as short a time as possible since it is costly to provide feed. One result of this is that virtually all animals on the plates of North Americans are mere children.

What Are The Characteristics Of Intensive Farming?

Intensive farming is characterized by higher yields wrested from plants, animals, and the earth, motivated by a desire for more product for less money. Money is the objective, and much of it goes funneling into the hands of a very few. Achieving these unnatural results requires high degrees of human manipulation.  Huge amounts of agrochemicals, including pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers, are applied generously to cropland. Intensive farming also requires high degrees of mechanization, from temperature controls in factory barns, to enormous harvesting tractors – these machines replace what was once done by human labor. Waste lagoons on animal farms and high levels of irrigation in intensive crop cultivation are other characteristics of intensive farming.

Disadvantages Of Intensive Agriculture

In many ways, the disadvantages of intensive farming tend to outweigh benefits, particularly when it comes to animal products since these are not essential for human health (and especially not in the volumes at which they are currently consumed in places like the United States).

Environmental Disadvantages

One of the most troubling environmental disadvantages to industrial agriculture is its contributions to climate change. Globally, agriculture is one of the largest drivers of anthropogenic climate change, accounting for around twelve percent of total emissions, and nearly a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions. Industrial crop production hampers the ability of soil to act as a carbon sequester, ultimately turning it into a carbon emitter. Animal agriculture (most of which is raised intensively) accounts for large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions, including 37{85424e366b324f7465dc80d56c21055464082cc00b76c51558805a981c8fcd63} of all methane emissions and 65{85424e366b324f7465dc80d56c21055464082cc00b76c51558805a981c8fcd63} of nitrous oxide.

Beyond climatic concerns, intensive agriculture produces vast amounts of pollution. Some of the largest dairy farms in the United States can have more than 15,000 cows, producing more waste than can be used as fertilizer on surrounding fields, meaning that much of it collects in open waste lagoons. These pose serious pollution risks to ground and surface water, considering that a farm with only 200 cows can produce as much nitrogen as a community of up to 10,000 people. Runoff from such farms can cause algae blooms, which can devastate freshwater, brackish, and saltwater ecosystems.

Poor Living Conditions And Hygiene For Livestock

Animals caught up within intensive agriculture operations – and there are billions of them around the world at any given time – are undoubtedly the most drastically impacted by the rise of factory farms. Egg-laying hens are crammed into battery cages and debeaked in order to prevent them from killing one another in such close confines, while male chicks – who are considered useless in egg production – are ground up alive by the millions. Battery cages are stacked upon one another, with feces falling through the grates onto other birds. Cows on feedlots and in dairy operations are forced to stand in their own excrement day after day.  The abuses seem endless and are not curtailed by federal anti-cruelty legislation in the United States, since the Animal Welfare Act, as well as similar legislation in many states, exempt farmed animals from consideration. Instead, this suffering is considered “necessary” – much to the convenience of companies profiting from their bodies.

Excessive Use Of Agro-Chemicals

Agro-chemicals are products such as pesticides (for insect and rodent control), fungicides (fungus and mold elimination), herbicides (to remove unwanted plants from fields), and fertilizers including nitrogen and phosphorus. Each of these products has deleterious effects on environmental and human health. For example, nitrogen is applied as a fertilizer to crops in order to compensate for depleted soils, caused by intensive production in the first place. This vicious cycle causes large amounts of nitrogen to seep into groundwater and surface waters, which can cause serious diseases such as methemoglobinemia, which affects hemoglobin iron in the blood and can lead to hypoxemia and death. High levels of nitrogen and phosphorus in freshwater and marine ecosystems can cause algal blooms which can be lethal to aquatic life, sometimes clogging up the gills of fish, or causing others to essentially suffocate due to a lack of oxygen in water.

Deforestation

Deforestation is an unfortunately common issue within intensive agriculture. One high-profile example comes from palm oil plantations, which have been running roughshod over the forests of Indonesia and Malaysia for years. The palm oil fruit contains a highly versatile oil, used in many products for sale in North American including ice cream, cookies, and shampoo. Massive swaths of forests have been burned and cleared to make way for palm oil monocrops, violating indigenous people’s rights and pushing iconic species such as the orangutan to the brink of extinction.

Risks On Human Health

intensive agriculture pollution

Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals

Industrial agriculture operations pose serious threats to human health, particularly to those who live within close proximity to these places, and even those who are downstream. Generally, CAFOs are placed within or adjacent to low-income communities and communities of color, the latter constituting an example of environmental racism deployed by agriculture corporations under the presumption that these communities have fewer avenues for refusal or resource.

Higher Risks Of Cancer And Birth Defects

The risks of cancer and birth defects for those working on intensive agriculture operations have been documented for many years. Despite this, agriculture companies have largely ignored warnings and scientific evidence calling for certain products not to be used. Bayer, which acquired the notorious pesticide company Monsanto in 2018, has been the target of lawsuits alleging that glyphosate, an ingredient in its popular weed killer called Roundup, is carcinogenic. Claimants in these lawsuits are said to number around 75,000 individuals as of 2020, with charges that Roundup caused non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and other diseases.

The risks don’t end with Roundup, however. In 2007 a study was conducted on men and women who work in greenhouses, finding increased risks for spontaneous abortions and prolonged time-to-pregnancy periods. Another study looked at pregnant women living within 500 meters of crops sprayed with pesticides, finding elevated instances of defects, including congenital heart and musculoskeletal. Regarding animal operations, male workers were found to be at greater risk of a variety of illnesses: on sheep farms, the prevalence of multiple myeloma was observed; poultry farms raised risks of non-Hodgkin lymphoma and colon cancer.

The Use Of Chemical Hormones In Food

Chemical hormones are often used in industrial agriculture in order to maximize yields. One of the most well-known is Bovine somatotropin, or bovine growth hormone, which is used to increase milk production in lactating cows. Although approved by the FDA, the hormone has been linked with increased instances of infections, lameness and other ailments in cows, and potentially to cancer development and other disorders in humans.

Possibility Of Poor-Quality Food Products

Due to depleted soils caused by intensive agriculture, produce, grains and other crops can wind up with less robust nutrient profiles than their counterparts raised organically or using extensive farming practices. Biofortification – whereby nutrients are added back into food before it is consumed by humans – is seen as a solution by some, however, others view it as being more of a bandaid approach, unsustainable in its own right.

Traditional Farmers Are Unable To Compete

In the United States, intensive agriculture corporations tend to be vertically integrated, freeing them from setting prices for their products that are determined by supply and demand, such as traditional farmers are forced to. This enables intensive operations to undercut smaller farms and eventually force them out of the market. Combined with the significant financial and political cloud multinational agricultural corporations have, fewer traditional farmers than ever are able to compete.

Intensive Farming Facts

  • The number of industrial farms increased by 230 percent from 1982 to 2002, according to the United States Department of Agriculture.
  • Only four companies in the United States produce 81{85424e366b324f7465dc80d56c21055464082cc00b76c51558805a981c8fcd63} of cows, 73{85424e366b324f7465dc80d56c21055464082cc00b76c51558805a981c8fcd63} of sheep, 50{85424e366b324f7465dc80d56c21055464082cc00b76c51558805a981c8fcd63} of chickens, and 60{85424e366b324f7465dc80d56c21055464082cc00b76c51558805a981c8fcd63} of hogs that are consumed in the country.
  • Between 1990 and 2015, pesticide use worldwide has increased by 73{85424e366b324f7465dc80d56c21055464082cc00b76c51558805a981c8fcd63}.

Intensive Farming Alternatives

One of the biggest questions when it comes to intensive farming is whether another way is possible. Some argue intensive ag is absolutely necessary to feed constantly growing populations. However, there exist many viable alternatives to industrial agriculture.

Agroecology is a promising framework, bringing naturally-occurring ecological processes to bear on farming techniques. Strengthening local economies and supporting small-scale farmers are also promising avenues that can be explored. These solutions tend to require far fewer agrochemicals and emit less greenhouse gas emissions.

Conclusion

Intensive agriculture may be efficient, but it comes at great cost to humans, animals, and the environment. Multinational corporations have pushed the earth and animals to the limits, in pursuit of ever-soaring profits.

Yet this system is unstable and ultimately unsustainable. Extensive farming, and other such alternatives, can be viable options, especially if dietary habits are changed, and fewer animal products are consumed in wealthy nations.

The future generations of individuals on this planet are owed an exploration of alternatives before it is too late.

Original source: https://sentientmedia.org

Deforestation in the Amazon: A Recipe For Our Next Pandemic

Deforestation in the Amazon: A Recipe For Our Next Pandemic

The impact of deforestation has often seemed distant enough to ignore, but the COVID-19 outbreak is a warning of what’s to come if we don’t save the forests.

When veterinarian Prof Alessandra Nava first learnt of a new respiratory disease killing people in China, the initial cases linked to a Wuhan wet market, she felt a chill of inevitability.

“It gave me that cold feeling in my stomach,” she said. “It was the realization that what we had been expecting had actually happened.”

As a part of a team set up by Fiocruz Amazônia to create a “Biobank”, she spends most of her days, when she is not self-isolating, sampling and studying bodily fluids from bats, rats, and primates. Her team, which also includes more vets, biologists and a geneticist, is trying to build up a library of viruses circulating in the Amazon in a bid to forestall a similar outbreak here.

As it became clear the virus was something new, and rippling effortlessly across international borders, chatter started up between the web of scientists – epidemiologists, ecologists, biologists, geneticists, vets – who work on the intersection between human and animal health,

“We said, ‘look at it … it’s arrived,’” she said. “We saw it coming. We expected a pandemic like this.”

growing body of research suggests that, rather than deadly pathogens lying in wait for an opportune encounter with humans, the spillover of zoonotic viruses – like Nipah, Swine ‘Flu, Ebola and, now, Covid-19, amongst many others – are often triggered by human destruction and exploitation of wildlife-rich habitats.

Where you have a huge biodiverse zone and an encroaching human footprint, you have all the ingredients for a virus spillover recipe

And as a tropical forest with high mammalian diversity facing rapid deforestation, some experts say the Amazon is particularly at risk.

“In a forest, you have natural reservoirs, you have hosts for viruses, for these kinds of pathogens. When we disrupt that, you can see the emergence of new infectious diseases,” said Nava, who lives in Manaus, a city at the heart of the Amazon rainforest.

Various outbreaks of diseases have been linked to deforestation, some of which bear a troubling likeness to the Amazon today. Take the first known outbreak of the Nipah virus in Malaysia in 1998: smog from Indonesian forest fires had reached Malaysia and forced fruit bats, the virus’s natural host, to seek food in mango farms. Nipah crossed over to the pigs that also ate the mangos, probably in bat saliva or urine. Next, it made the leap to farmers, causing hundreds of deaths from rapid encephalitis, with a terrifying mortality rate of 40 per cent.

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A tower of smoke rises from the forest in Rôndonia state during the record-breaking fires in August 2019. Photo: Victor Moriyama / Greenpeace

Deforestation in the Amazon reached its highest rate in a decade last year, as fires set to clear land burnt so fiercely that at one point they turned the 1,000-mile distant skies of São Paulo as dark as night. Loggers and encroaching cattle ranchers burn up pristine forest, overgraze the pasture, then sell the land to monoculture soy farmers and move on, penetrating deeper into the jungle. On the Amazon river’s snaking tributaries, gold miners fell trees for landing strips and roads, dredge river beds and hunt bushmeat. They throw up informal settlements without sanitation or plumbing, where rain barrels and abandoned tyres provide breeding grounds for disease-carrying mosquitoes.

Growing cities are attracting migrants from the countryside and swallowing up more jungle too. In 2018 informal settlements expanded into previously uninhabited land around Manaus roughly every 11 days. Diseases originating in animals go by the name “zoonotic” and Brazil already has many. Chikungunya, dengue fever, yellow fever, Zika, hantavirus, leptospirosis, leishmaniasis – to name only a few – already cause hundreds of deaths a year and pose a huge burden to the public health system. In Manaus, it is threatening to buckle under the additional strain of Covid-19 cases.

“Where you have a huge biodiverse zone, the Amazon, and then you have an encroaching human footprint, through urbanisation, road networks, deforestation, extractive industries like logging and mining, you have all of the ingredients for a virus spillover recipe,” said David Wolking, Senior Manager of the One Health Institute at the University of California, Davis and an expert on the interface of human and animal health.

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In Manaus, graves are dug at a new area of the Parque Taruma cemetery for suspected and confirmed victims of the coronavirus pandemic. Photo Michael Dantas / AFP

Wolking was also global operations manager for USAID’s PREDICT project, which, between 2009 and 2019 performed a similar function to the Biobank, but on a global scale. Wolking and his team collected samples from over 164,000 animals and people and found more than 1,000 new viruses. These included a new Ebola virus, Bombali, in West Africa, and the lethal Marburg virus in bats in Sierra Leone, far further west than it had ever been detected before.

The project completed field-based surveillance and lab activities around the world last autumn, a couple of months before the first case of Covid-19 emerged in Wuhan, though PREDICT did receive a six month extension in March 2020 to provide emergency support for Covid-19 response efforts.

Ecology of disease

The crux of the theory known as the “ecology of disease” holds that increasing encroachment into biodiverse ecosystems creates situations where species interact with humans in novel, intimate and ultimately dangerous ways.

According to Dr Thomas Gillespie, disease ecologist at Emory University’s Global Health Institute, there is now scientific consensus that these human-induced changes are making the situation worse.

“Zoonotic diseases are hard to predict and many ecological and evolutionary factors play a role,” he said. “Nevertheless, scientists agree that human-induced land-use changes and wildlife hunting/trade are key drivers.”

“The clearance of forests for crops and livestock, including but not limited to industrialized production, and extractive industry actions like mining and logging can negatively impact the environment, creating a cascade of factors that facilitates the emergence and spread of diseases.”

We are breaking down the forest into small pockets, we are pushing species in different ways

The data supports this too: scientists studying the zoonotic infectious diseases that have emerged since 1940, found that land use change was the most important primary driver. It was linked to 31{85424e366b324f7465dc80d56c21055464082cc00b76c51558805a981c8fcd63} of the viral spillover events studied, with agricultural industry changes linked to a further 15{85424e366b324f7465dc80d56c21055464082cc00b76c51558805a981c8fcd63}.

But Gillespie adds that: “human alterations do not always have negative health impacts. It is usually a combination of factors that lead to the emergence of infectious diseases. For example, deforestation in combination with hunting for bushmeat or converting deforested lands into human settlements.”

Much of the analysis around the emergence of Covid-19 has focused on the wet market in Wuhan – with animals that might never meet in the wild packed tightly together in unsanitary conditions and subsequently eaten, it may have provided the perfect crucible for viruses to multiply, shed and jump species.

But more broadly, land-use change, particularly of tropical, biodiverse forests, is key, said Dr Carlos Zambrana-Torrelio, associated vice president for conservation at EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit studying what they believe to be an increasingly porous relationship between human and ecosystem health.

“If you imagine continuous forests like the Amazon basin, the process of development, of changing them into croplands, produces fragments across the landscape,” he told Unearthed. “We are breaking down the forest into small pockets, we are pushing species in different ways.”

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An island of green remains in a cleared area of the rainforest in Pará, seen from the air during burning season when farmers clear large areas for soya or cattle. Photo: Greenpeace

 

Fragmentation allows some wild animals with a history of passing on disease, like rodents and some bat and primate species, to thrive and multiply; others, like the Malaysian fruit bats, might be forced closer to humans in search of food. Others might find that their new neighbours offer an easy meal: Nipah outbreaks in Bangladesh have been caused by bats drinking from containers collecting date palm sap.

“If we are offering them food, the numbers will increase, but also there are more humans working there, so we have more exposure to wildlife,” said Zambrana-Torrelio,  adding that EcoHealth Alliance was currently exploring this link in Liberia, where the fruit from palm oil plantations is thought to attract rats responsible for Lassa fever outbreaks.

Bats and rats

A study released this month by the One Health Institute showed that the species – rodents, some primates and bats – that flourish in these conditions are more likely to host diseases that spill over to humans. It also showed that, at the other end of the spectrum, so are animals whose population declines were directly connected to hunting, wildlife trade and habitat encroachment. They host twice as many zoonotic viruses compared to species that are in decline for other reasons.

However, the notion that particular species – such as bats, rats and primates which have donated the most pathogens to humans in the past – are naturally more suitable as pathogen reservoirs than others is controversial in the scientific community.

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Two monkeys sit on a branch in the forest on the outskirts of Manaus. Photo: Greenpeace

“Bats and primates are disproportionately likely sources of viral spillover to humans,” said Gillespie, “due to their phylogenetic similarity and unique immune-metabolic dynamic respectively”. That’s the similarities in the evolutionary histories of their relationships with other organisms, and the relationship between their immune and metabolic systems.

But Dr Kris Murray, an ecologist at Imperial College’s School of Public Health and MRC Global Infectious Disease Unit the Gambia, said that: “A lot of people believe bats and rats and primates are a particular risk of spillover to people  but actually I think that’s probably wrong. If you look more closely at the association between pathogens and hosts you don’t see a particular role for bats or rodents – it’s simply a function of the number of species.”

That is to say, there are many many different types of bats – and many bats – so more diseases are likely to come from that family.

And when it comes to primates, their association with zoonotic spillover events may be more to do with their vulnerability to hunting and land-use change than it is to do with genetics and immunity.

Mosquitos and mammals

Deforestation also benefits some disease vectors – an animal that can act as an intermediary host – like mosquitoes.

“There are two easy ways for a pathogen to get into a human, one is by a biting insect, because it breaches the skin, and the other is by eating it,” said Bennett.

Working in the Peruvian Amazon in the late 1990s, epidemiologist Dr Amy Vittor at the University of Florida’s Emerging Pathogens Institute showed that the larvae of the Amazon’s main malaria vector Anopheles darlingi flourish in the dappled water pools found along the edges of roads penetrating forests and the patchy deforestation that springs up alongside them.

In Borneo, a 2016 study linked a spike in cases of a type of malaria normally found in macaques (monkeys) with rapid deforestation in the region. Researchers determined that monkeys were huddling with increasing density in the remaining fragments of forest. Mosquitoes were proliferating on the margins, feeding on the macaques, then passing the disease to people working on adjacent new palm plantations. In Brazil, increased urbanisation and deforestation have been linked to higher rates of hantavirus, leptospirosis, Zika and yellow fever.

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A Recife city health worker and a Brazilian Air Force soldier inspect a home for potential mosquito breeding grounds during Brazil’s Zika virus outbreak in 2016. Photo: Mario Tama / Getty Images

 

There are other effects too, said Zambrana-Torrelio, including some we don’t fully understand yet. Skittish predators that ordinarily keep reservoir species in check, like jaguars, might flee entirely. Large herbivores like capybaras which usually affect the structure of vegetation, crushing plants and eating seeds, might be hunted to the point of local extinction, causing further ripples of unpredictable change.

“Around these fragments are livestock, or croplands, or some other kind of human activity, and humans get more exposed,” Zambrana-Torrelio added. “It becomes a different forest, with different resources.”

It’s a catastrophe. I think five or ten years from now, we can expect a new disease coming from our mistakes

Climate change can also affect the spread of both disease vectors and hosts, enabling them to expand into new areas. A paper published in 2013 predicts that by 2050, there will be a significant increase in the range of the potential habitat for the bat species known to host henipaviruses in western Africa, India and northern Australia.

Zoonotic diseases are increasing in impact – a 2017 paper co-authored by Zambrana-Torrelio and Murray states that emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) “of wildlife origin, which are responsible for nearly all recent pandemics (e.g., Ebola, MERS), constitute the majority of the high impact EIDs from the last few decades, and are a significantly growing proportion of all EIDs combined.”

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A family of capybaras, the largest rodents in the world, in Mato Grosso. Photo: Sylvain Cordier / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

But scientists admit it can be difficult to parse a perceived increase from improved diagnostics and the exponential growth in our interconnectedness; new diseases can spread far faster and further than they could before.

“Certainly [new diseases] are becoming ever increasingly important because we’re so joined up,” said Professor Malcom Bennett, an expert in zoonotic and emerging disease at the University of Nottingham. We can assume, Bennett said, that “things used to jump across from a nonhuman animal into a human animal and then… peter out. Now, because everyone is joined up not just locally and regionally but nationally and internationally, if something can infect people and can be passed from one person to another there are far more opportunities for that to happen.”

Indeed, Murray pointed out, “One hundred years ago, because there was no airline network to speak of, Covid could have just affected a much smaller community because there was much less ability to facilitate the spread of that around the world – although we know from past influenza pandemics it is still possible.”

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An aerial view of the edge of Manaus, where the city meets the forest. Photo: Greenpeace

 

The Biobank was set up in Manaus in 2015. The team targets different parts of Amazonas – the largest state in the Amazon – with different degrees of degradation. They trap rodents, bats and primates, take anal and oral swabs, and samples of feces, blood and urine, then release the animals back into the wild.

The programme is already producing interesting results: The team have been studying corona viruses in Amazonian bats and found that bats in pristine areas of the forest had fewer viruses  than those in areas with human development.

“We found less viral diversity and fewer “positive” bats for viruses in pristine areas compared to anthropized areas,” Nava said. “In the anthropized areas, [where the bats had] greater contact with domestic animals and people, the bats sampled had greater viral diversity and a greater number of positives for some viruses.”

Similarly, Wolking said that some of the data gathered during the PREDICT project appeared to suggest that viral spillover events may potentially happen with less frequency from wildlife communities within forests, because virus shedding is less in healthy animals in their natural habitat when they are not stressed.

“In the forest when animals are living the way they live, they are healthy…maybe they are not shedding viruses in the same way as they are once they are trapped, and put in a cage and transported and thrown into a market, where an animal is obviously freaked out and stressed and its biology can go into hyperdrive,” Wolking said.

A forest under siege

Brazil was already at risk, but the stakes have become significantly higher since the election of Bolsonaro, Nava said. The right-wing populist, who speaks openly of his desire to open up the Amazon to mining and agribusiness interests, has made no secret of his contempt for conservation efforts, which he sees as a needless brake on GDP growth. Deforestation alerts for the first three months of the year were fifty percent higher than last year, and at their highest levels since the monitoring programme began five years ago. An area roughly the size of New York City was lost in those three months alone.

“It’s a catastrophe,” Nava said. “I think soon – five years or ten years from now – we can expect a new disease coming from our mistakes… We have an environmental politics that is allowing the forest to be destroyed.”

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Bolsonaro supporters in Sao Paulo protest against the social isolation measures taken by the governor to contain the spread of the coronavirus, April 19th 2020. Photo: Fabio Vieira / FotoRua / NurPhoto

 

Sources within ICMBio and IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental protection agencies, told Unearthed last year that the Bolsonaro administration was deliberately weakening and defunding their agencies, while land-grabbers, ranchers and miners pushed into protected areas with impunity.

The fires that blazed through the Amazon last year will only contribute to this dangerous phenomenon. As with the Nipah virus, these fires destroy the habitat and food sources of wild animals, driving them into greater contact with human settlements and farms.

The fires also cause feedback loops, setting in motion destructive cycles that produce conditions conducive to more fires.  When the rainforest’s protective canopy is lost, the forest floor is exposed to intense tropical sun, drying out and losing resilience to blazes. Smoke hanging in the atmosphere can suppress rainfall, while trees lost in the fires no longer help water condense and produce more rain. A study released earlier this year showed how wildfires like last year’s inhibit the forest’s capacity to pull carbon-dioxide from the  atmosphere, exacerbating climate change and in turn making droughts and fires even more likely.

It’s a really complex social issue. Developing some kind of way of doing sustainable business is really essential

Meanwhile, fire smoke has caused respiratory disease spikes in indigenous communities, weakening resistance to some viruses. Recent research suggests this may well include COVID 19. Climate change can itself trigger disease flare-ups – droughts in Brazil cause Chikungunya virus to spread because mosquito larvae breed in barrels used to store water – or make populations vulnerable to existing diseases. Last year Georgetown University researchers estimated that, thanks to a warming world, as many as a billion people could be newly exposed to disease-carrying mosquitoes by the end of the century.

Biodiversity loss is inevitable with this deforestation, creating further risk through something ecologists call the dilution effect. The theory, according to Bennett, posits that where some species are more vulnerable to infection than others, higher biodiversity means there’s a lower chance of a susceptible host being infected.

“In North America you are much more likely to get infected with West Nile Virus if you live in the suburbs than in the forest,” he said. Some ecologists think this is “because there are fewer bird species, so a greater proportion of them are able to maintain the virus.”

Forest farming

Agriculture and live-stock farming in deforested regions also plays a key role.

Most of the livestock in the Amazon are cattle, not pigs, which have a biochemistry and DNA that is singularly similar to ours. But that doesn’t mean cows pose no risk. Researchers believe that the measles virus probably jumped into humans from cattle thousands of years ago, when they were first domesticated, and Rift Valley Fever in Africa is predominantly found in cattle but can be passed to humans via mosquitoes.

The scale of agriculture makes a difference, too – monocultures, be they soy or swine, are always more vulnerable to disease. Nipah had probably been in pigs before; but in the 80s and 90s an economic boom in Asia had created high demand for pork. Small-holdings transformed into crowded, industrial-scale piggeries. Viruses thrived in these conditions, proliferating easily, amplifying and then jumping to humans with terrifying lethality.

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A cattle ranch in the Marabá municipality, southern Pará state. Photo: Greenpeace

The way we assess the risks of big industry in biodiverse environments has to change, Gillespie argued.

“Far too often, commercial activities that require large-scale land-use change levy tremendous costs that are not considered in cost:benefit analyses because the costs are not shouldered by those profiting. For a future with lower risks of disease spillover, we need to incorporate such negative externalities into the decision-making process.

The paradox is that we’re very risk averse but irrational in risk assessment. We prize gross domestic product (GDP) and ever-growing economies without acknowledging that unsustainable exploitation of natural resources has become the norm and that natural capital dwarfs our human economies.”

Even so, the risk from big commerce doesn’t negate the risk from smallholdings in some areas, said Dr Pranav Pandit, co-author of the One Health Institute study.

We are completely dependent on nature and have made our future vulnerable

“Backyard livestock farming in the rural areas of [developing] countries are also important interfaces. Generally, these are pastoral people having their animals – poultry, a few goats, cows – just in the backyard of their houses. These are the people who tend to interact more with animals.”

“It’s a really complex social issue. Any change we need to really involve stakeholders including the community itself. Any industry or any development is going to bring in some kind of economic development to the community people. Developing some kind of way of doing sustainable business is really essential.”

Either way, it is a mistake to think of viruses or bacteria as having agency; no matter how aggressive and malign their effects may appear to us, they are dependent on a host, Wolking pointed out.

“Viruses don’t really look for new hosts to infect,” Wolking said. “They just look for the ability to enter a cell to replicate.”

A virus may have evolved within the microbiome of a single host species and existed there peacefully for millenia, without necessarily causing its host any problems. A truly successful virus won’t kill its host, because then it can no longer successfully replicate inside that host. But when we transform a habitat within which the animal has adapted over millennia, we are accelerating evolution.

“We are completely dependent on nature and have made our future vulnerable”, said Gillespie. “However, this process continues unfettered because the consequences are far in the future and we tend to discount the risk.

“Four months ago, pandemics did not feel like an urgent issue, people did not feel vulnerable. Now the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting people – it’s affecting the stock market, their quality of life, their health, and their loved ones – now this feels urgent, now they feel vulnerable.

“It’s in moments like this that real change can happen. The key is ensuring that this crisis catalyzes societal and environmental solutions instead of reinforcing entrenched irrationality.”

Original source: https://unearthed.greenpeace.org

The Brutal Truth Behind The Ugly Industry of Pig Farming

The Brutal Truth Behind The Ugly Industry of Pig Farming

The pork industry is one of the most exploitative and abusive as pig farming ensures a miserable existence for the animals involved. Here are the raw facts.

Pigs are highly intelligent, social creatures that deserve compassion and respect. They don’t deserve to spend their short lives confined to atrocious conditions waiting for imminent slaughter.

Pig farming holds many heinous secrets that the pork industry never wants you to hear about.

That’s why it is so difficult to access pig farms to take a look at what’s happening behind the scenes. They simply don’t want you to witness what happens to the millions of pigs that are taken to slaughterhouses to be killed each year.

In fact, there are many ag-gag laws in place to ensure that what is happening behind the walls (and barbwire-laden fences) of pig farms is known by as few people as possible.

Pigs are highly intelligent animals that are remarkably cognizant of their surroundings, and thus, their suffering.

According to neuroscientist Lori Marino of the Nonhuman Rights Project, it’s been shown that “pigs share a number of cognitive capacities with other highly intelligent species such as dogs, chimpanzees, elephants, dolphins, and even humans.”

Pigs are so smart, in fact, that they can recognize other pigs they already know (as opposed to pig “strangers”). They can also form long-term memories and they know which people have treated them well and which haven’t.

The latter point is particularly disheartening considering the amount of abuse that takes place on pig farms all around the globe.

Questioning the Narrative

How do we let things like this happen?

How are people able to continue eating pork (and meat in general) when this isn’t an exception to the rule but standard practice in countless farms around the world?

And why does one story like this get so much coverage while others don’t?

Is seeing a piglet getting its head smashed against the wall really the bar that society has set when it comes to what’s acceptable and what isn’t with animal abuse?

Marketing Makes Pig Farming Look So Humane

First off, there is no such thing as “humane” slaughter.

It’s an oxymoron at best. At worst, it’s extremely misleading marketing that allows for dishonest and deceitful labeling.

It’s similar to labeling chickens “free range” because they have “access” to a small hole in the side of a CAFO.

The food industry wants to deceive you. Think about cereal boxes (morning candy) and how much they talk about health and nutrition.

But when it comes to pig farming and the pork industry, the lies have much more serious consequences.

121 million dead pigs to be exact.

But, The Truth is Far From Right

And if that number isn’t scary enough for you, that’s just in the US alone.

Not a single one of those pigs were killed in a humane way because such a way doesn’t exist.

Is it possible that some lived better lives than others? Absolutely.

The ones that were raised on small family farms clearly had it better than those raised on factory farms. But their story still ended the same way.

What is Pig Farming?

Pig farming is the breeding and raising of pigs with the purpose of harvesting their meat and skin for human consumption and use.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, there are just under one billion (986M) pigs alive in the world today living on pig farms.

97{85424e366b324f7465dc80d56c21055464082cc00b76c51558805a981c8fcd63} of pigs raised in the United States are confined (and eventually slaughtered) on factory farms.

According to Barry Estabrook, the author of Pigtales, “[The pigs] never see the light of day. They never set foot on anything but a bare, hard floor. They breathe that poisoned air 24/7.”

The United States is third behind only China and the European Union in pork production at 12,166 metric tons in 2018.

pig farming production statistics

And while the US is producing pork at such high rates, take a look at how much is being exported:

pork export statistics

So beyond the horrifying details about pig farming that we will discuss in a moment, the food industry is shipping most of the supply abroad, leading to higher rates of food insecurity in the US.

Pig farming supplies the food industry with common products like bacon, sausage, pork chops, salami, ham, and bologna.

These are the products you hear about the most. They are the products most likely to be imitated by plant-based substitutes.

However, gelatin is also made from leftover pig parts and is used in numerous different food products. Many of these products would never be thought of as vegan by those not paying attention. Many candies, ice cream, marshmallows, and jello products contain gelatin.

Pig farming also uses the skin and bladders of pigs in order to create leather products like shoes, footballs, purses, belts, and other accessories. Pigskin is considered “Genuine Leather”

The truth about pig farming and the atrocities that occur behind the sc on labels.

Discover The Truth About Pig Farmingenes might not surprise you.

If you are part of the animal rights movement in any way, you already know about factory farming. You are already aware that there are horrible living conditions and abuse that run rampant.

But what about the details? What nuances occur on pig farms that might be different on dairy farms or poultry farms?

So how are pigs treated on pork farms?

Mother Pigs (Sows) Confined to “Gestation Crates”

Gestation crates confine mother pigs to a lifetime of immobility and discomfort.

The crates are designed to keep the sows still while pregnant. The sow can wiggle a few inches forward or backward but turning around is impossible.

Sows will spend almost all of their lives pressed between iron. They spent the entirety of their pregnancy behind bars before being moved to farrowing crates.

There, they will nurse their young for very little time before the piglets are torn away. The babies will never see their mothers again. Once separated, the mothers will return to the gestation crates to relive the nightmare over and over again.

This horrifying process lasts for upwards of six gestation periods (on average). She is then deemed unable to continue and is slaughtered.

The pork industry vehemently argues that the crates are comfortable and keep the mother pigs safe. Animal rights activists know better.

Pressure from animal rights groups has definitely helped the cause.

Cargill, one of the largest pork producers in the US, succumbed to public outrage and phased out gestation crates altogether. They opted for “group house” for pregnant sows. While it is an improvement, many pig farmers still use gestation crates and will continue doing so.

After the gestation crate comes the only other space the sow will ever know before slaughter.

After Giving Birth They Are Moved to “Farrowing Crates”

About a week before the mother pig is about to give birth things get even worse for them.

The mother pig is moved from the gestation crate to the farrowing crate. Shockingly, the farrowing crate is even smaller than the gestation crate.

Farrowing crates are typically housed in farrowing sheds where countless mother pigs are confined waiting to give birth.

Factory farms typically squeeze as many farrowing crates into the shed as possible. The idea, as usual, is to maximize space and maximize profits.

Farrowing crates were introduced in the 60s in an effort to try and protect piglets from being crushed by their mothers. While the thought behind the creation was in the right place, the execution lagged in the compassion department.

While the purpose of the crates is to save the piglets, activists have uncovered many cases of piglet mortality due to poor living conditions.

The mother pig will stay in the farrowing crate for approximately four weeks before losing her babies. This will happen twice per year.

Sows Are Impregnated As Soon As Separated From Her Babies

Once the mother pig has her babies taken away, she is removed from the farrowing crate and immediately impregnated. This happens about one week after giving birth and losing her offspring.

This process happens through artificial insemination. Then it’s back to the gestation crate again.

On average, a pig’s litter will consist of 10-12 piglets. If the average sow goes through the gestation cycle 6 times, they will have anywhere between 60-72 babies before being sent to slaughter.

Remember, pigs are highly social animals and are cognizant of their relationships.

In nature, a mother pig will search for miles to find the perfect nesting spot for their young. They search high and low for a safe place to raise their piglets. Their maternal instinct is strong and they suffer greatly when separated from their young.

To continually put a mother pig through this amounts to unfathomable cruelty.

Piglets Are Separated From Their Mothers Very Young

A lot of the time, the piglets are taken away in poor health.

Many piglets aren’t able to get the nutrients they need as they are weaned from their mothers very young. They are typically separated at 21 days of age. Naturally, a piglet would be fully weaned from her mother between 12 and 14 weeks.

Beyond the issue of early separation, many sows suffer from Postpartum Dysgalactia Syndrome (PPDS).

There’s a series of different potential causes for PPDS. Almost all of the causes are related to the living conditions and treatment on factory farms.

Piglets Are Castrated Without Any Anesthesia

The pork industry and pig farmers choose to castrate pigs for different reasons.

Because factory farming is all about efficiency, unwanted pregnancies and an increase in population can cause problems. Factory farms are practically overflowing with livestock as is. An uncontrolled population can make conditions even worse and help spread more disease.

Other reasons why pig farmers choose to castrate is to prevent boar taint in their meat production.

The main reason comes down to control and efficiency. The pork industry is a business and pig farmers want their bottom line to be protected. They don’t see their pigs as sentient beings, rather pegs in the profit-generating machine.

While there are benefits to castrating pigs on factory farms, there is no reason to do it inhumanely.

Mercy for Animals has documented “workers ripping out the testicles of conscious piglets with the use of painkillers.”

Painkillers are not meant to be used as an anesthetic.

In Europe, the Brussels Declaration was put forth to phase out castration without painkillers by 2012 and surgical castration altogether by January 1, 2018. Neither deadline was hit.

Germany has pledged to only castrate piglets proper anesthesia starting in 2019. Only time will tell if they follow through on that promise. If so, it’s a step in the right direction of unnecessary suffering.

However, pig farming is producing a record amount of pork and as populations grow, so will production.

Animal-free farming and clean meat are the only solutions in the foreseeable future.

Problems Caused by Common Pig Farming Practices

Human animals will never know the extent to which non-human animals suffer.

The disconnect that has stemmed from years of urbanization and food industry marketing has made us numb. Only few can truly accept the idea that all animals have the ability to truly suffer.

There are many problems that stem from a lifestyle of confinement, abuse, and imminent slaughter.

And some of these problems lead to ill-planned and reckless solutions, perpetuated the suffering the pigs face.

Cannibalism

Supermarket behemoth Tesco made headlines in 2018 when shocking footage surfaced at a pig farm in England that supplies some of their pork products.

Viva!, an animal welfare group, reported acts of cannibalism due to extreme stress. Cannabilism is not inherent of pigs in nature.

The images were so graphic that most media outlets, including The Daily Mail and some animal rights sites, refused to publish them. We are taking the same route as well as not to distress our readers any further.

Aside from the pigs being cannibalized on this farm, there was news almost as shocking from the same report.

Red Tractor is a seal of approval granted to companies for upholding top-notch farming standards. Their motto is Traceable, Safe, and Farmed With Care.

Hogwood Pig Farm, where Viva! reported pigs being cannibalized, boasts the Red Tractor seal of approval.

What does this say about Red Tractor and the farms that don’t have the seal?

Tail-Biting

One disturbing behavior found on pig farms and not in nature is tail biting.

Overcrowding and poor living conditions are just some of the factors at play with this abnormal behavior.

The problems with tail biting (and the similar ear biting) go beyond the pain and discomfort. When pigs bite each other’s tails in order to deal with their stressful environment, there can be dire consequences.

Injury and infection just scratch the surface when it comes to what pigs are experiencing when their tails are bitten.

Beyond injury, paralysis or carcass condemnation from spinal abscesses are commonplace on pig farms.

Tail docking

The process of cutting off a pig’s tail in order to prevent tail biting is called tail docking.

Tail docking is performed without anesthesia during the first week of the piglet’s life. Beyond the obvious pain and trauma, the side effects of tail docking in the long term have yet to been studied thoroughly. Acute psychological and behavioral impacts have been observed in the pigs that go through the tail docking process.

The main issue, however, isn’t being addressed.

The pork industry and pig farmers are looking to put a band-aid on a broken leg and avoid the real problem at hand. Factory farming is the issue and it can’t be sidestepped by quick fixes.

Tooth Clipping of Piglets to Avoid Biting

Cutting down the teeth of piglets is another ill-concocted, dangerous way of avoiding tail biting.

Some potential side effects of include gum and tongue injuries, abscesses of the teeth, and inflammation.

One study revealed that “both clipping and grinding induce lesions such as pulp cavity opening, fracture, hemorrhage, infiltration or abscess, and osteodentine formation.”

While the intention of clipping the teeth of piglets are to prevent future injuries to the sow and other pigs, again we see that the system in place is the problem and simple workarounds won’t fix the real problems at hand.

Disease

Diseases run rampant in pig farming operations. The more animals on site, the more likely it is to have diseases spread around.

On factory farms, pumping pigs full of antibiotics is one of the only ways to avoid the spread of illness. Sick pigs to a farmer equate to more work and a bite out of the profits.

Some of the most common illnesses and diseases on pig farms are the following:

  1. Exudative dermatitis
  2. Coccidiosis
  3. Respiratory diseases
  4. Swine dysentery
  5. Mastitis
  6. Porcine parvovirus

The best way to avoid the spread of disease on pig farms is to adopt better farming practices. When it comes to factory farming, whether for pigs, cows, or chickens, the only way to avoid systemic problems is to change the system. Band-aids on broken legs never do the trick.

Types of Torture Pigs Endure

Mistreatment and abuse of animals on factory farms are so commonplace that it no longer surprises anyone. Pig farming is no exception. It’s a problem that all animals face with today’s meat industry.

There are so many examples of undercover operations resulting in appalling footage that it no longer shocks people. Most people simply filter out the overwhelming amount of abuse that’s reported on a regular basis.

Treated Inhumanely

To list all of the instances of the inhumane treatment of pigs would take a lifetime. This is why animal welfare groups and activists are constantly fighting to improve the conditions of pigs on factory farms.

And beyond the stories that are already out there, many haven’t even surfaced yet because of ag-gag laws. Whistleblowers in numerous states are now holding their tongues out of fear of severe punishment.

Smithfield Food, the world’s largest producer of pork, has repeatedly come under fire for inhumane practices.

When they announced back in 2007 that they would be phasing out gestation crates, activists became hopeful that they would lead the way and influence other major corporations and farms.

Although they announced mission accomplished nearly ten years later, undercover activists claim otherwise.

Wayne Hsiung of Direct Action Everywhere said that he and colleagues “absolutely did see mother pigs giving birth in gestation facilities” after infiltrating numerous Smithfield farms.

The major players in the food industry are able to say practically whatever they want. Major producers in the states where ag gag laws have been approved are well protected from whistleblowers speaking out.

Even smaller farms in states where no ag gag laws exist are protected. Simply walking up to the property line of a factory farm has been more than enough to get the police called on activists.

If factory farmers aren’t held accountable, what is the point for them to treat animals more humanely?

What You Can Do To Stop Cruelty Against Pigs

It’s easy for individuals to feel that their voice won’t be heard. When going up against major players in the food industry, it’s natural to feel intimidated.

But that doesn’t mean your voice and your choices can’t be a part of the change you desire.

Grassroots movements have changed policy in the past. PETA has spearheaded numerous policy changes in the past that started from the ground up.

Change can happen when there is passion behind actions.

Take a Vegan Lifestyle

How can you help stop pig farming?

One argument that vegans hear all of the time is that they are making a difference. Many meat eaters are quick to point out that the animals would have died anyway.

But veganism is growing. Becoming a vegan isn’t a passing trend that will soon fade away. The more people that adopt the vegan lifestyle, the lower the demand will be for pig products.

Does this take time? Of course. Change won’t happen overnight. However, the more educated the populace becomes about the cruelties behind pig farming (and factory farming in general), the closer we will come to achieving real change and progress.

Support Legislation That Abolishes This Abuse

While grassroots movements start from the group up, animal rights activists and advocates need to start voting for the right politicians.

People from the movement need to consider running on platforms based on change and animal rights. Policy makers and people in leadership roles do have power and their voices can be influential.

Combining grassroots movements and empowering people with the right mindset is the perfect combination. Doing so can be the trigger necessary to the right kinds of bills and laws that protect animals and their rights.

Join The Cause

Getting involved in any way possible is a great way to start. Going vegan is the best first step you can take, taking action is the second.

Volunteer for animal rights groups. Call out animal abuse when you see it. Continuously educate yourself about what’s happening in the animal rights world. Boycott companies that test on animals.

Most importantly: Be vocal.

Conclusion

Pig farming practices treat sentient beings like products. The atrocities behind the pork industry will never stop if people don’t speak up.

Pigs are highly intelligent, social creatures that deserve compassion and respect. They don’t deserve to spend their short lives confined to atrocious conditions waiting for imminent slaughter. No animal deserves this.

Pigs on factory farms suffer greatly and it’s our duty as non-human animals to protect those without a voice. If not, we are complicit in the death of each sentient being.

What are you going to do to help end the cruel practices on pork farms?

Original source: https://sentientmedia.org/
Working with farm animals: When you don’t want to face the truth

Working with farm animals: When you don’t want to face the truth

There is a term used by psychologists – cognitive dissonance – which occurs when a person holds two or more contradictory beliefsideas, or values, or participates in an action that goes against one of these three, and experiences psychological stress because of that.

The discomfort is triggered by the person’s belief clashing with new information perceived, wherein they will try to find a way to resolve the contradiction to reduce their discomfort. Many workers on factory farms and in slaughterhouses suffer from this state of mind. The article below describes what happens when you cannot resolve these two opposite views.

Susana Romatz doesn’t consider herself to have been a farm kid, per se, but her grandfather did raise rabbits for meat. Looking back now, she says that navigating that as a child is likely what gave her the “skill-set for disassociating” early on. “I knew what he was doing with them, and it gave me that toolbox to shut that feeling off,” she says.

It was this ability to turn away from her emotions and instincts that would allow the animal-loving, on-and-off-again vegetarian to take work as a farmhand on a goat farm in western Oregon. It’s an experience, the now-vegan—and vegan cheese-maker—says she is still trying to heal from.

At the time, Romatz was a new teacher seeking additional work for extra cash. She wanted something outdoors and physical. That area of Oregon is considered quite progressive, she says. “Ethical,” “free range,” “organic,” products abound. So when a “humane” goat farm was looking for help, she says that she was on board. “I kind of started to buy into that line of reasoning, that you can keep an animal, do animal husbandry, in a way that is kind to the animals,” she recalls. It didn’t take long though, until “things started to disintegrate that idea.”

What made this particular goat farm—which produced milk and cheese and sold goats for meat—“humane” was that the animals were free-range. “They had a lot of land,” Romatz says, and the farm was “family-owned.” Romatz soon realized, though, that these things meant very little. “Just because it was higher up on the level of kindness to animals, compassion to animals, there were still some things that were really bothersome to me.”

At the top of that list, she says, was the disbudding of baby goats—kids—without anesthesia. Disbudding is a standard farming practice, done to stop the growth of horns, and purportedly to prevent property destruction and horn-related injuries. (Horn-related injuries to other animals commonly occur in confined spaces.) Without anesthesia, most animal welfare and rights groups condemn the practice, though it remains common.

“It was really horrifying,” she recalls. “They actually shrieked. [The farmers] would have to hold them down and basically burn off their horn buds with a hot electric poker.” She says some of the kids would never go near humans again. “It was one of the things I had to work really hard at shutting off. I had to not think about it. I could tell it was very, very painful.”

Romatz says that she tried justifying it to herself at the time by considering animal agriculture a trade-off. “With animal husbandry, there are trade-offs that you have to make when you are commodifying an animal, no matter how much you love them. You can’t capitalize on their bodies without making certain decisions that might be questionable,” she once believed. “When you are using animals in that way, you have to make those kinds of decisions,” to earn a financial profit.

But even as Romatz attempted to take a pragmatic approach—much like that of the farm owners—she always felt, in the back of her mind, that it was all very wrong. “The commodification of animals, milk, and bodies in that way, keeping the goats pregnant pretty much year ‘round, being fed grain [rather than their natural diet] year-round to keep them lactating, I knew it all had to be hard on the goats’ bodies.”

The separation of mothers and newborns also weighed heavily on Romatz. “The baby goats were taken away from their mothers almost immediately,” she says. In the dairy industry, mothers and newborn calves are routinely separated in order to reroute milk for human consumption. With the goats, Romatz says she was told by the farm owners that mothers needed to be separated from calves due to fears of a particular virus, the caprine arthritic encephalitis virus, transmitted through the mothers’ milk. (Administering blood tests to identify infected animals and removing them from the herd is also an effective solution.)

Romatz says that the calls between the moms and babies were indisputable. “This is something I would experience on a daily basis during kidding season,” she says, “when there were lots of babies kept in a pen, and lots of the does [mothers] kept in other pens, and you could hear them calling back and forth to each other.” Only the female kids were isolated, though, as the farm owners needed only them to stay healthy—so they too could become perpetually impregnated and lactating one day. The male kids were free to potentially become infected with the virus, she says, because they would be sent off to slaughter at two or three months old anyhow. “It was definitely sad,” she says, of the days the baby boys were sold, “knowing where they were heading.”

In order to mentally cope with with the work, which Romatz did for three years, she says, “you just keep shifting your bottom line, you keep shifting it, until you get to the point where you’re just like, ‘Wow, how was I even able to walk into that every day?’”

Eventually, Romatz left the farm to focus on teaching. She says that it was a relief to no longer have to mentally block out many aspects of her professional work. “All that work you’ve been doing to hold back those thoughts, you can’t do it anymore, and the flood comes, and then you can’t see it the same way ever again.”

Romatz went vegan two years after leaving the farm. After she and her partner rescued a dog, she says, “My partner just texted me and said ‘I can’t do animal products anymore,’ and it literally was so fast that I was able to switch. It took me maybe half an hour.” She says that it just felt right. “It was like everything just fell into place at that moment. All these little doubts and feelings I had been having all this time, and I had been fighting against them, or trying to convince myself—it’s that cognitive dissonance.” She recalls a “constant battle inside myself, doing things that were totally opposite from what my beliefs are.” When deciding to go vegan, “it was so easy for me to finally let all that go. [I realized] that was all an illusion, that was a lie to get me to spend money, a lie to get me to stop looking further into this.”

Her bottom line, she says, immediately rebounded.

Now, Romatz feels a sense of wanting to make up for her past. In addition to being vegan, Romatz is a vegan cheese advocate, of sorts. Out of necessity, she began making her own vegan cheeses, using locally grown hazelnuts and special vegan cultures that she created herself. The cheese is very labour-intensive and expensive (she notes that nut farms are not subsidized in the way dairy farms are) so, for now, Romatz only makes cheese for family and friends. Romatz has a great desire to educate others; she sells her vegan cultures online and provides information and recipes on her website—“to give other people the tools to make these cheeses themselves.”

As for the owners of the goat farm, which is still in operation today, Romatz says, “they aren’t bad people.” They just see things differently. “It was just the older [farmers’] view that animals are more like property,” she says. “They took care of the animals to the degree they needed to [be profitable].”

Romatz believes that the bombardment of messaging—from media, culture, tradition, and family—enables some of us to “become disassociated from the reality of what you are actually experiencing.” She says that it took her a few years before she could really understand all that she experienced on the farm, “before I could allow all the things that had happened there to start to soak in, to realize how I had tricked myself to be able to work there.”

Today, Romatz says she is moving forward, but will never forget the animals of her past. “I’m really trying to respect the lives of the animals who have come and gone. But in understanding and moving forward, you don’t have to necessarily dive into the trauma of the past; you have to understand it and notice it, but you don’t have to beat yourself over it. Thinking about [my experiences] and also moving forward have been very important to me.”

Original Source:SentientMedia.org