TO THE JAPANESE FISHERMAN OF TAIJI FROM YOKO ONO LENNON, 20 JANUARY 2014.
Dear Japanese Fishermen of Taiji,
I understand how you must feel about the one-sided-ness of the West to be angry at your traditional capture and slaughter of Dolphins. But that tradition was made only when the world, and Japanese Fishermen did not know what it meant to do harm to the Dolphins. I’m sure you have heard so many speeches in which all of these things have been discussed. So I will not bore you with it.
But I think you should think of this situation from the point-of-view of the big picture. Japan has gone through such hard times lately. And we need the sympathy and help of the rest of the world. It will give an excuse for big countries and their children in China, India and Russia to speak ill of Japan when we should be communicating our strong love for peace, not violence.
I am sure that it is not easy, but please consider the safety of the future of Japan, surrounded by many powerful countries which are always looking for the chance to weaken the power of our country. The future of Japan and its safety depends on many situations, but what you do with Dolphins now can create a very bad relationship with the whole world.
The way you are insisting on a big celebration of killing so many Dolphins and kidnapping some of them to sell to the zoos and restaurants at this very politically sensitive time, will make the children of the world hate the Japanese.
For many, many years and decades we have worked hard to receive true understanding of the Japanese from the world. And, because of our effort, Japan is now respected as a country of good power and ingenuity. This did not happen without our efforts of many decades.
But what we enjoy now, can be destroyed literally in one day. I beg of you to consider our precarious situation after the nuclear disaster (which could very well effect the rest of the world, as well).
Please use political tact and cancel the festival which will be considered by the rest of the world as a sign of Japanese arrogance, ignorance, and love for an act of violence.
Before I knew any better, I used to beg my parents to buy me “pet” fish from pet stores. We’d bring them home and dump them into a probably-not-big-enough tank—and for some reason, we found joy in watching them swim in pitiful, endless circles.
Back then, it didn’t occur to me that there was anything wrong with condemning a tropical animal, who would swim freely in nature with no boundaries, to life in a 10-gallon glass prison. As it turns out, there is SO much wrong with it.
Now, we know that puppies, kittens, birds, and other animals sold in pet stores come from “puppy mills” and other mass breeding facilities. But where do fish in pet stores come from?
Saltwater Fish
Ninety-five percent of saltwater fish sold in stores are captured from the wild.
Fishers douse the coral reefs with cyanide, which is ingested by the fish who live there, and as reported in Scientific American, “[t]he resulting asphyxiation stuns some fish and sends others into spasms, making them easy to grab by hand or net.”
Half the affected fish die on the reef, and 40 percent of those who survive the initial poisoning die before they reach an aquarium.
Freshwater Fish
Approximately 90 percent of freshwater fish are raised on farms. Goldfish, for instance, are usually bred in giant tubs in facilities that produce as many as 250 million fish per year.
These animals are sold to pet stores and other shops, and many are doomed to live in plastic bags or bowls, neither of which provides them with the space or oxygen that they need.
Bettas
Pet stores like to promote betta fish as easy “starter pets” who are able to survive and thrive in extremely tiny containers with only a few inches of water to swim around in.
Betta fish are native to Asia, where they live in the shallow water of rice paddies, ponds, or slow-moving streams. Since the water is shallow, it is also warm, which is why betta fish in captivity require a minimum of 10 gallons of water in an aquarium that can be kept heated to at least 75 degrees.
Oh, and if you’re wondering how they get to pet stores, here’s your answer:
Bottom line: Buying any animals, including fish, from pet stores supports industries that treat animals as nothing more than merchandise and sends a message that animals’ lives are only worth what we’re willing to pay for them.
Please don’t buy fish or support pet stores that sell them.
The U.S. holds the dishonorable distinction of being the only nation in the world, other than Gabon, that continues to conduct invasive experiments on chimpanzees.
In their natural homes in the wild, chimpanzees—humans' closest living genetic relatives, who are more like us than they are like gorillas—are never separated from their families and troops. Profoundly social beings, they spend every day together exploring, building and using tools to solve problems, foraging, playing, grooming each other, and making soft nests for sleeping each night. They care deeply for their families and forge lifelong friendships. Chimpanzee mothers are loving and protective, nursing their infants and sharing their nests with them for four to six years. They have excellent memories and share cultural traditions with their children and peers. They empathize with one another and console their friends when they are upset. They help others, even at a personal cost to themselves. They grieve when their loved ones pass away. They laugh when they're enjoying themselves and grimace when they're afraid.
Sadly, in the early 1920s, experimenters in the U.S. began purchasing baby chimpanzees who had been kidnapped from the forests of Central and West Africa. To capture baby chimpanzees, hunters would kill the mother chimpanzees and any other adult chimpanzees who tried to defend the babies. Often, whole families killed just to obtain a few babies. The mortality rate among these babies during capture and transport was high. Those who made it to U.S. laboratories suffered terribly and died young. In 1923, the notorious American psychologist Robert Yerkes—who dreamed of creating the ideal chimpanzee "servant of science"—purchased a young bonobo and a chimpanzee he had hoped to study into maturity. Both died within a year. Undeterred by the carnage and suffering inherent in the chimpanzee trade, experimenters continued to fuel the practice. In the early 1950s, the U.S. Air Force secured the capture of 65 young chimpanzees from Africa for use in military flight experiments at Holloman Air Force Base in Alamogordo, New Mexico. The descendents of these chimpanzees were used in infectious disease experiments and in high-velocity seat belt tests are now warehoused at the Alamogordo Primate Facility.
While many people believe that this practice is a shameful relic of the past, it persists today in the U.S.With a 2010 ban on great ape experimentation passed in the European Union, the U.S. holds the dishonorable distinction of being the only nation in the world, other than Gabon, that continues to conduct invasive experiments on chimpanzees.
Chimpanzee Experimentation in the U.S. in the 21st Century
More than 900 chimpanzees still languish in laboratories in the United States, with as many as 80 percent of them simply warehoused because there is no longer a need to use them in experiments.
In these prisons, chimpanzees are very often caged alone and deprived of the freedom, autonomy, and meaningful social interaction that they need. There are no families, no companions, no grooming, and no nests. There are only cold, hard steel bars and concrete—and terror and loneliness that go on for so many years that most chimpanzees sink into depression, eventually losing their minds. As a result of having to endure the terror and pain of having their bodies routinely violated for experiments and the loneliness of their tiny steel and concrete prison cells, many chimpanzees bear lifelong emotional scars. Numerous studies have shown that even long after they are retired from experimentation, many chimpanzees exhibit abnormal behavior indicative of depression and post-traumatic stress. They suffer from symptoms such as social withdrawal, anxiety, and loss of appetite. They pull out their own hair, bite themselves, and pace incessantly.
Most chimpanzees in U.S. laboratories have been given diseases, such as AIDS, hepatitis, cancer, infection with respiratory syncytial virus, malaria, and heart disease, intentionally--even though advances in technology make these procedures irrelevant and decades of experimentation show that chimpanzees' bodies do not react in the same way to these diseases as humans' do.
In 1995—after hundreds of chimpanzees were bred in laboratories in the 1980s and '90s on the heels of the AIDS crisis—the National Institutes of Health (NIH) imposed a moratorium on the breeding of chimpanzees after it was discovered that chimpanzees don't get sick from HIV infection and do not contract AIDS.
Four facilities funded by (NIH) continue to conduct experiments on chimpanzees. These facilities include the Southwest National Primate Research Center, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette's New Iberia Research Center, the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, and the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. Experimenters at Yerkes subject chimpanzees to neuroimaging, cognitive and motor testing, and invasive endocrine status tests in long-term studies on aging. At Southwest, MD Anderson, and New Iberia, chimpanzees are subjected to multiple procedures, such as, among other things, liver biopsies and frequent "knockdowns" in which they are traumatically shot with a tranquilizer dart gun. Recently at MD Anderson, chimpanzees were also used in an absurd experiment looking at whether salt intake increased blood pressure, something that has been well-established in humans for decades.
Chimpanzees are also imprisoned in commercial laboratories. Pharmaceutical giant Merck recently revealed studies in which chimpanzees chronically infected with hepatitis C virus were subjected to invasive liver biopsies and blood work. A contract testing laboratory called BIOQUAL (formerly known as SEMA) had been tormenting chimpanzees in NIH-funded experiments for hepatitis C and other illnesses. After learning that BIOQUAL was separating young chimpanzees from their mothers, locking them in individual cages, infecting them with norovirus—which causes diarrhea, vomiting, and stomach pain—and then subjecting them to months of painful biopsy procedures, PETA purchased stock in the company to urge it to phase out the use of chimpanzees and called on NIH to cut funding for the experiments. Just six months after PETA purchased the BIOQUAL stock, the company announced that it was ending all its chimpanzee experiments.
In 2011, a landmark report by the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine (IOM) that examined the scientific validity of experiments on chimpanzees concluded that "most current biomedical research use of chimpanzees is not necessary." In response, NIH announced that it was suspending consideration of funding for any new experiments on chimpanzees. The agency also stated that all currently funded experiments on chimpanzees would be reevaluated, that funding for as many as 50 percent may be ended based on the IOM's conclusions, and that any chimpanzees not currently being used in experiments, including the chimpanzees in semi-retirement at the Alamogordo Primate Facility, may not be enrolled in any studies during NIH's review.
Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act
While the IOM report and NIH's review are steps in the right direction, the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act (H.R. 1513/S. 810), which has been wending its way through Congress with tremendous bipartisan support in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, is the only measure that would permanently end the use of chimpanzees and all other great apes in invasive experiments and retire more than 600 federally owned chimpanzees to sanctuaries where they would, at last, be able to live out their days in peace. You can join PETA's effort to liberate chimpanzees from laboratories here.
In 2012, PETA conducted an undercover investigation at Chief Saunooke Bear Park (CSBP), a roadside collection of bear pits in Cherokee, North Carolina. CSBP confines bears to desolate concrete cells, where they are forced to beg for food and are deprived of all that is natural and important to them.
PETA's investigator found that the bored and frustrated bears turn endlessly in circles. One of them routinely rocks back and forth—a sign of profound deprivation and stress.They bite the pits' metal bars, which breaks their teeth. This is painful and can cause bone infections, so it requires veterinary care, but PETA's investigator never saw a veterinarian at CSBP and never saw the bears given any pain relief.
PETA's investigator also found cruelty:
Workers sometimes leave the bears, who have a remarkably well-developed sense of smell, trapped amid their own waste all day long. Instead of removing feces, they spray a citrus-scented product into the pits. One worker told PETA's investigator, "You just got to be careful because [federal officials] think you're trying to hide something. Which we are."
CSBP's manager and bear handler admitted that workers deny bears food because, "[i]f you feed them … they ain't gonna eat for people."
The manager boasted that he sprays water at one bear "all the time … to get his ass up" and force him onto display.
The park's bear handler said it took "20 shots … in the head" to kill one of CSBP's bears. He said that there is "[n]othing better than a bear that's been eating bread and apples all its life. Meat's good."
Life is busy and things, important things, are often
overlooked in the midst of the frantic day to day activities.
"Things," like a dog who lives outside on the end of a
chain.
The dog who sometimes is thrown a bit of food, and occasionally
gets some water.
The dog who exists in a life of utter loneliness and neglect.
That dog, who day after day, week after week, year after year,
is in the same place, can become part of the landscape - easy to overlook, easy
to forget.
One dog, named "Harvey," suffered this pitiful
existence.
This week, someone called animal control to let them know about
a dog who was chained up in the backyard of a house.
The dog was in the dirt, he had fallen and was unable to stand.
It turns out that his "family," a term too kind to use
because it somehow implies that there should be a semblance of caring, had
moved away and left him where he had been chained for years.
Those people left him without food, water or shelter.
They left their fourteen year old dog to die alone.
The dog, covered in fleas, dirt and maggots, was in pain and
suffering.
But in his last moments, he was not alone - for the first time
in his life, he was touched by the hand of someone who cared.
She writes of those final moments:
I
named him ♥ Harvey ♥ and stood by his side while he took his last breath and
petted him and told him what a good boy he was and that he would no longer be
neglected or suffer. He looked at me with such pretty brown eyes as to say
“thank you” and then he was gone.
Life is busy, but it is crucial that everyone remain vigilant to
what is happening around them.
Harvey is not the only dog who was forced to live a torturous
life on a chain.
Whoever finally picked up the phone to call the authorities
likely did not notice that no one was coming out to give the long-neglected dog
food, or water.
Whoever that person was, had likely grown used to the sad dog
that sat in the back yard of a house.
All the while, Harvey suffered, while nobody was paying
attention.
UPDATE (November 26, 2012, 1:00 p.m. Eastern time): Following
PETA's release last week of disturbing whistleblower reports of 27 animal
deaths during the filming of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, we have asked authorities in New Zealand, where The
Hobbit was filmed, to investigate and pursue appropriate criminal charges
if warranted.
*****
UPDATE (November 20, 2012, 4:00 p.m. Eastern time): PETA responds
to Peter Jackson's statement: Five whistleblowers
reported more than two dozen animal deaths during the production of The
Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. They raised concerns not just once but
repeatedly to both the head wrangler and the head of production about the
unsafe housing conditions for animals and about Shanghai the horse, who was
hobbled (his legs reportedly tied together when he proved to be "too energetic"
for his rider). But their concerns were outright ignored.
With the exception of the hobbled horse, all claims of animal
injury and death are directly related to how the animals were housed and fed.
Jackson attempts to deflect these serious charges by talking about the use of
animals during action sequences—even though these damning incidents did not
take place when cameras were rolling. Two horses went over steep embankments
and died (one was found with her head submerged in water), a horse sustained a
severe injury after being put in with other horses despite known problems,
sheep broke their legs in sinkholes, and chickens were mauled by dogs—all
instances of extreme negligence. It seems to PETA that instead of vainly
defending himself, Jackson should be giving a firm assurance that this will
never happen again. He is the CGI master and has the ability to make the
animals and other interesting creatures in his movies 100 percent CGI, and PETA
calls on him again to do so.
*****
When The Hobbit is released in December,
audiences will see an adventure story set in a fantasy world. For the animals
involved in the filming, however, the abuse and neglect that they experienced
were far too real. Recently, PETA gave the Associated Press the exclusive on
the reported animal death toll. In all, five horses, a pony, and several
goats, sheep, and chickens were allegedly maimed or killed.
According to whistleblowers from The Hobbit: An Unexpected
Journey, the following occurred:
·A horse named Shanghai was hobbled (his legs were tied together so
that he couldn't move) and left on the ground for three hours because he was
too energetic for his rider. Afterward, in order to hide his rope burns for
filming, his legs were covered with makeup and hair. Hobbling is an outright
violation of the American Humane Association's (AHA) guidelines.
·One horse was killed and another horse was injured after being
placed with two highly strung geldings, despite concerns that the geldings
would be too aggressive.
·Another horse was killed after falling off an embankment in a
severely crowded paddock.
·When the horses were moved to the stables, another horse died
after being fed large amounts of food that he wasn't used to. The horse had
shown signs of colic, an extremely painful illness.
·When the horses were moved back to the paddocks after this
incident, another horse had the skin and muscles of her leg torn away by wire
fencing.
·Several goats and sheep died from worm infestations and from
falling into the sink holes that covered the farm.
·Numerous chickens were mauled and killed by unsupervised dogs or
trampled by other animals when left unprotected.
How can something like this happen when the unit production
manager was warned and the production was monitored by the AHA?! Furthermore,
this movie was directed by Peter Jackson, a master at computer-generated
imagery (CGI). In a movie that features CGI dragons, ogres, and hobbits, CGI
animals would have fit in perfectly. Jackson could have made The Hobbit without
using a single animal—and he should have.
Send a message to filmmakers that hurting and
killing animals for a film is unacceptable and refuse to see movies that do.
Urge Peter Jackson to hold himself and his crew responsible when it comes to
animal safety on film sets. Use the button below to send him a message now!
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