Moving this blog

I’m moving this blog to our own server. I’ve moved all the content and comments to blog.liberationbc.org.

If you want to leave any comments, please leave them on the new blog.

Thanks!

Native People and the Seal Hunt

By Becci

Well, it’s that time of year again.  The Canadian Seal Hunt starts in about a month and a half. I refer, of course, to the annual slaughter of about 300,000 baby harp seals.

I think that a lot of the people who actually support the Canadian Seal Hunt are understandably confused by the concept that it is, at least in part, a sustainable native hunt.

It is not, not even remotely.

The species targeted during the hunt are baby HARP seals (and occasionally hooded seals), most of them between 12 days and 3 months old.  (Yes, it is still legal to hunt baby seals, despite what the government might tell us.  They have only made it illegal to kill pups 11 days and younger!)  About 325,000 are killed every March and April.  Native people, on the other hand, prefer to hunt adult RING seals.  They kill just 10,000 per year, and they actually HUNT them.  To quote Arnaituk M. Tarkirk, an Inuit man from Kuujjuak, Quebec:

“We are skillful hunters who hunt adult animals for food, That is not the same as bashing a pup, which can’t move, over the head.”

He even goes so far as to hypothesize that the end of the Canadian Seal Hunt would actually BENEFIT the native population:

“There would be 180,000 more seals left for us to eat when they are a few years older, and also people would not have such an aversion to sealskin products as they have after seeing the way they kill the pups, so craft work made with adult seals would be more popular.” (source)

Meanwhile, NativeRadio.com has also come out against the seal hunt:

“There is a difference in an indigenous culture’s right to hunt for food and economic survival, and the non-indigenous Newfoundlander’s massive slaughter of defenseless animals for profit and vanity!” (source)

The Canadian government, of course, doesn’t care.  They just want the seal hunt to continue, but the work of activists for the past few decades has made it basically a pariah in the global community.  To counter this, they had to come up with a scheme to appeal to “a poorly informed and emotional public”.  Yes, they actually said that.  More specifically, Brian Roberts, a senior advisor to the Canadian Minister of Indian and Northern Affairs, said that, in a speech.  He also said:

“The first step was to neutralize the appeal of the animal protection lobby.  To accomplish this it was necessary to mount an equally emotionally powerful counter-appeal…based on the survival needs of aboriginal communities which depended upon the continuing taking of fur-bearing animals.” (source)

I am not native myself, but I find it disgusting and exploitative that the Canadian government, which on the whole has been totally dismissive in regards to the concerns of aboriginal people, is now claiming to be their champion.

If you want to read some of the most frequently asked questions in regards to the seal hunt (what happens to the meat?  what about the cod?) check them out here: http://liberationbc.org/issues/seal_hunt

Internet Activism, Vegan Waffles, and Underwear

I made a short trip down to Portland, OR to do a workshop on internet activism this past weekend as part of the Let Live Foundation’s activism series.

They’re the same batch of people who put on the Let Live Conference last summer, and this workshop was an expansion of a talk I did then. We had a decent turnout, about 30 people, I think. The discussion covered a lot of ground, from social networking to search engine optimization, and more.

If anyone is interested in hearing more about the information that we covered, or if you were there and have any questions, feel free to contact me.

No trip to Portland is complete without a few good meals, of course.

My host for the trip was Josh Hooten, of Herbivore Clothing Company. I couldn’t have asked for better hospitality and nicer people to hang out with. After picking me up from the airport, he dropped me off at Sweet Pea for an amazing all-I-could-eat vegan waffle breakfast. Did I say amazing? I could barely walk after I ate.

In the evening after the workshop Josh, Chad (from FoodFight!), and I went to the Bye and Bye, an all-vegan pub. Delicious food and good conversation. One of the things that Vancouver really lacks is quality vegan comfort food.

After a super good breakfast (tofu scramble with artichoke hearts and olives) at the Vita Cafe, I spent the next morning hanging out at Herbivore. I helped Josh and Heather silkscreen screenprint some underwear they’re getting ready in time for Valentine’s Day:

Get your own pair!

All in all it was a very enjoyable trip, and I think I ended up learning more than anyone else learned from me. Portland is such a wonderful city, and the people there are genuinely friendly and welcoming. We in Vancouver have a lot to learn.

Thank you Josh, Michelle, Ruby, and George for sharing your home with me. Thank you Chad and Emiko for driving me around and buying me one of the best burritos I’ve ever had. Thank you Portland!

Of the Kingdom Art Show

Last night we went out to the opening of a student show at Emily Carr, “Of the Kingdom.”

It was quite good and definitely worth going to see. If you’re going to be down on Granville Island, take a few minutes to walk through the gallery. I’m showing a few images below, but this is just a small selection of the great work these students have done.

Instead of trying to explain what the show is all about from my outsider perspective, I’ll let the show speak for itself:

From cave paintings to contemporary corporate logos, the images, ideas, and values animals communicate to us, play a pivotal role in contemporary art, visual language and popular culture. Wildlife was one of the first subjects of art. This exhibition seeks to address how art employs non-human sentient beings as muses for expression. Have animals become mere vessels of romanticism? Why do we worship wildlife as gods, build human characteristics into animals for the sake of storytelling, and continually represent them in art? How are animals forced to operate within a world where one species dominates above all the others? Exhibiting a wide variety of media, artists and disciplines, Of The Kingdom aims to uncover the function of wildlife within the context of contemporary art to explore the relationships between animals and humans.

Show description

"Endangered Originals" by Gayle Koyanagi

"To Good Times" by Neil Chung

"Untitled" (detail) by Meghan Leeburn

Here’s the list of the students:

Vanessa Black
Dyanna Beckwith
Erin Busswood
Neil Chung
Christina Christie
Aisha Davidson
Katrina Dombsky
Catherine Chun-Hua Dong
Jules Francisco
Katalina Geurrero
Emma Kesler
Gayle Koyanagi
MAKA
Meghan Leeburn
Philip Materna
Zoe M. Peled
Karolle Wall
Emma Walter

Note: The show will be up through February 2nd.

Why do we need to ban foie gras?

You may wonder, “Why can’t we just ask people to stop serving foie gras and attempt to convince them to use alternative ‘products?’”

In my experience, business owners and chefs will say whatever they can to get rid of protesters and avoid trouble. But often they don’t mean it, and will continue to do what they’ve said they’ll stop as soon as everyone’s back is turned.

For instance, last spring, West Restaurant told the media that they were going to stop serving foie gras in their restaurant. They managed to get some good publicity out of it, but then just a couple of months later foie gras was secretly back on their menu.

Meinhardt’s Market had also pulled all foie gras from their shelves. They managed to keep it off until recently. But they are definitely selling it again. Why? Is there so much demand that they are willing to go back on their word?

In May of last year, Mark Taylor of Cru wrote to me and said that “Foie is off the menu, with no return.” I obviously took this to mean that he had removed foie gras from the menu and would not be serving it anymore. But then I just saw that he has it on his small plates menu during the Vancouver dine-out. Plus it’s on his Valentine’s Day menu. Once again, what good is his word?

This reminds me of a passage in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail:

Then, last September, came the opportunity to talk with leaders of Birmingham’s economic community. In the course of the negotiations, certain promises were made by the merchants—for example, to remove the stores’ humiliating racial signs. On the basis of these promises, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and the leaders of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights agreed to a moratorium on all demonstrations. As the weeks and  months went by, we realized that we were the victims of a broken promise. A few signs, briefly removed, returned; the others remained.

The breaking of promises by business owners has historical precedent, albeit a shameful one.

There are many examples of the dishonesty of restaurant owners, chefs, businesses, etc. They obviously have no concern for the animals whose lives are taken. It’s quite obvious that businesses are not capable of regulating themselves, if no one’s word has any value anymore.

Dishonesty is rampant in the animal exploitation industries. Huge efforts are made to conceal or distort the truth. The only viable recourse is to work to legally prohibit the sale of products that are produced through cruel and inhumane methods.

This is not to say that some businesses have not taken stands and stuck with them. John Bishop stopped serving foie gras and veal in his restaurant because both are wrong. Pino Posterraro stopped serving foie gras and has stood by his decision. Neither of these pillars of Vancouver’s restaurant community see the need to lie and deceive. Honestly seeking and facing the truth is a virtue.

I wonder how the honest restaurant owners and chefs feel about the level of deceit practiced by their colleagues?

Foie gras is a cruel dish better left unserved | Straight.com

To some, foie gras represents the ultimate in luxury food. In reality, it is one of the most extreme forms of cruelty still permitted today, and yet it appears on the menus of many of Vancouver’s finest restaurants.

We were asked to write an article for the Straight.com politics blog about our foie gras campaign. You can read it here:
Foie gras is a cruel dish better left unserved | Straight.com.

Please leave a comment on the article, and also let me know what you think of it.

Bocuse d’Or – Who gets the prize? Not the animals.

Later this month, David Wong, an instructor at Vancouver’s Dubrulle Culinary Arts at the Art Institute of Vancouver will be headed off to France to compete in the Bocuse d’Or. I’ve read that it’s like the Olympics of food. Cooking food, not eating it.

While I’m all proud that Vancouver has a shot at sending a winner to the competition, it bothers me how this is yet another opportunity for the world to celebrate the dismemberment of sentient beings. And for what? A prize?

These thoughts are prompted by this article in the Vancouver Sun which ran over the weekend.

Here’s a description of a couple of the dishes Chef Wong is preparing:

In the dying light of 2008, Chef Wong worked out his chops for a group of Vancouver media at Moxie’s Classic Grill on Davie Street, serving an appetizer of Atlantic lobster with foie gras and passion fruit vinaigrette followed by a main course of pork loin wrapped with bacon and vegetable ratatouille.

Sounds delicious, doesn’t it?

Poor lobster, though, trapped when he was just out looking for food. After being hauled out of the ocean he got dumped into a tank and flown 3,000 miles to Vancouver. Remember, the Atlantic Ocean is 3,000 miles from Vancouver, which means that a whole lot of fuel had to be used to get that lobster across the continent. That’s a big carbon footprint for a little lobster.

Photo by Grump (from flickr)

Then, to top it all off, he gets killed. Not thwacked over the head or anything “humane” like that. No, he either got tossed into boiling water alive, or he had his body slit down the middle, also while still alive. Chefs like their lobsters to be fresh. That’s why they keep them alive until the very last minute.

Whole Foods Market no longer sells live lobster because of the cruelty involved in keeping them in tanks and boiling them alive.

The foie gras probably came from a duck in Quebec. That’s where almost all of our foie gras comes from. Otherwise it was flown in from France. Talk about a carbon footprint!

The duck who was the original owner of the liver that became the foie gras spent a few months packed in a barn with 2,000 of his closest friends, much like chickens raised to be meat. Packed and fattened.

Then he got hauled into another shed, where he was given his very own little cage, and a nice person came and stuck a pipe down his throat and filled him full of food a couple of times each day for the next two weeks. What could be better than never having to look for food?

Ducks, though, have instincts that tell them to look for food. Under normal conditions, they spend pretty much the whole day wandering around looking for food. They especially like to dabble around the edges of ponds where they can find the best insects and plants to eat. This food searching fills some basic needs for activity.

Oh yeah, they also never get to swim. Ducks who don’t get to swim? There’s something just plain wrong about that alone.

Photo from Farm Sanctuary

The duck stuck in the shed – he can’t go around looking for food or anything else for that matter. He can’t even turn around. I wonder what he does all the time? What TV? I wonder what would happen to my mind if I was caged like that?

The force-feeding goes on for a couple of weeks, until his liver is taking up most of the space inside his body. When they remove it there is a massive cavity and his other organs are packed to the sides.

Whole Foods Market has also stopped selling foie gras. Charlie Trotter and Wolfgang Puck have both decided they don’t want any part of it. Here in Vancouver Pino Posteraro and John Bishop have both stopped serving foie gras, because, well, it’s just plain wrong.

Photo from Farm Sanctuary

The pig whose name got changed to “pork” was raised to get really big, really fast. Because of the way they’ve been bred, they often have joint problems as they get older. Pigs can live to be 15-20 years, at least. This pig was about 6 months old when he got strung up. No point in letting them experience life if they’re just going to end up as food, right? Younger meat is always more tender, anyway.

So, that’s the story of the unwilling participants in this meal. Do I hope it wins? Of course not. I hope that David Wong loses to the surprise vegan chef who wows the French judges with his amazing cruelty-free dishes. Wouldn’t that be fantastic?

Sorry, I don’t think there will be a happy ending. Some chef will get a lot of praise for “creativity” or even “genius” but a whole lot of innocent animals are going to have to suffer and die so these “artists” can prance about and display their “expertise.”

What a shame.

Links from around the web

Here are some links from around the web that you might find interesting.

Audubon magazine has a fantastic article about the environmental impacts of meat-eating.

So why in the world am I a dedicated vegetarian? Why is meat, including sumptuous pork, a complete stranger to my fork at home and away? The answer is simple: I have an 11-year-old son whose future—like yours and mine—is rapidly unraveling due to global warming. And what we put on our plates can directly accelerate or decelerate the heating trend.

No one can call themselves an environmentalist if they’re still tucking into the steak or chicken wings.

Read the whole article here:
http://www.audubonmagazine.org/features0901/viewpoint.html

The latest post on Animal Person has some interesting thoughts on non-human language, and includes the cutest video EVER:
http://www.animalperson.net/animal_person/2009/01/on-the-communication-of-sentient-nonhumans.html

A darkly humorous look at what an animal might think of being slaughtered by a small farmer:
Thank God we were slaughtered by a local farmer instead of one of those big, impersonal corporations!

Ok, I guess I must have been living under a rock for a while, but I never realized Gene Baur had a blog. How crazy is that? Here’s his latest post, as always thoughtful and articulate:
http://www.genebaur.com/blogengine.net/post/2009/01/Big-Problems-e28093-Simple-Solutions.aspx
(If only we could all be as smart and well-spoken as Gene.)

This next article has been popping up on blogs all over the internet. It’s from Newsweek, and it’s about how hunting is altering or reversing evolution, making the weak and sickly MORE likely to survive than the big strong animals. Because we keep killing all the big strong ones and we don’t kill the weak ones. We’re smart that way.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/177709/page/1

Here’s a nice piece on activism. I know a lot of the time when I’m out doing any sort of outreach I get angry a lot. Mostly because people just aren’t changing as soon as I want them to. Changing my perspective could change how I interact with other people and could make me more effective.
http://loveallbeings.org/blog/activism-as-being-not-doing/

Lastly, this isn’t an article or a blog post, but rather a whole website: Altweb: Alternatives to Animal Testing. It’s sponsored by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. For those of you who are working on issues of animal testing, this could be a good resource.

That’s it for today. Enjoy!

Happy New Year

Happy New Year!

Looking back over the past year, I’m amazed at what we’ve been able to accomplish.

Here are some of the highlights:

• As you may know, LBC launched our foie gras campaign last spring.  The campaign has generated so much media interest that we’ve been covered nearly thirty times by media outlets ranging from the Globe & Mail to Business in Vancouver.   And with our members’ help, LBC effectively convinced Overwaitea Foods, Oyama Sausage, Cafe de Paris, Meinhardt Fine Foods, Aqua Riva, Bacchus, Cru, Gastropod, the Greedy Pig and Connor Butler to permanently drop foie gras from their establishments. To date we’ve collected almost 3,000 signatures in favour of a ban on the sale of foie gras in Vancouver.
• Important local victories over fur have been won by LBC throughout the year: Bosley’s Pet Food Plus removed fur-lined dog sweaters from every store, Tisol agreed to stop selling almost* all fur toys, Boys’Co pulled fur products from all their stores in the middle of the holiday shopping season, and, after an LBC in-store disruption, the Bay dropped their weekly fur ads in the Vancouver Sun. (*As of this date, Tisol still carries fur-covered mice dipped in catnip, which they keep behind the counter and only sell to customers who request them.)
• After three years of relentless protesting and millions of leaflets distributed by LBC in the Vancouver area, we managed to shut down the Broadway Street KFC. What’s more, we were instrumental in forcing KFC Canada to become the first in the world to adopt PETA’s recommended standards for the millions of chickens killed by KFC Canada each year. Read more about this decision here.
• LBC distributed Vegan Outreach booklets to nearly 3,000 people while showing the video Meet Your Meaton Robson Street!  (Check out a Vegan Outreach booklet here. PDF file)
• Animals don’t need to suffer to help people. With many generous contributions, we collected 99 pounds of vegan food for the Greater Vancouver Food Bank this holiday season!

Please donate to Liberation BC now to help us continue to make a difference for animals in your community in 2009! Check out our donation wishlist. With your help, we can accomplish much more and make a greater difference for the animals in the coming year. Please, donate now.

Fur industry in trouble

I just saw this article that appeared in the Vancouver Sun a couple of days ago. It’s unfortunately really only about the wild fur market, but it is good news for opponents of this cruel industry:

http://www.vancouversun.com/industry+fears+bear+market+pelts/1127696/story.html

Now if only the market for fur-farm fur were in the same trouble…

For more information on the fur industry, see our fur page:

http://liberationbc.org/issues/fur