During the recession, many people with horses lost their homes and can no longer care for these amazing animals. Some of these surrendered or abandoned horses find loving new homes, but others become victims of neglect and abuse or end up being sent to slaughter. Many people are working to change that.
To find out more about the issue of homeless horses, I spoke to Shelly who is the founder of Dude’s Ranch Equine Rescue Center in Acton, Ca. Her rescue is at capacity – they have to turn away thousands of horses every year for lack of funding and space. What happens to these horses that are turned away? According to the Humane Society, there is no data on the specific number of horses slaughtered in this country every year, but some speculate it to be in the six-digits. There are many organizations and sanctuaries around the country like Shelly’s that adopt out horses and desperately need help. If you’re thinking of getting a horse, please, please don’t buy one! Instead, consider adopting one of these beautiful creatures, or encourage others who you know love horses to adopt. Find out how to adopt a horse through the Humane Society here. You can also call your local animal sanctuary to find out if they have any horses available for adoption. If you are unable to adopt a horse, you can still make a donation to the Humane Society to help homeless horses.
Alicia Silverstone is an actress, producer, author, activist, vegan mom. But the author of bestseller The Kind Dietmakes time to interact with and encourage new and aspiring vegans through her website, www.thekindlife.com. In addition to tips, recipes, and personal views on going green, she posts success stories that site members have shared with her, helping others to see the wonderful changes that a plant-based diet can bring to your health and well-beinga
Check out this new video from our friends at Farm Sanctuary. It is narrated by the beautiful, Allison Janney. I promise, you’ll have a tear in your eye before it’s done playing. To find out more about Farm Sanctuary, visit their website and don’t forget to adopt a turkey!
A couple of months ago, in early November, 2011, my wife Madeleine and I visited Natural Bridge State Park in the mountains of Virginia, and as part of that, we also visited the Monacan Indian Living History Village that is there. It was a fascinating experience!
The Monacans were a tribe living for many centuries in the Appalachians before the arrival of Europeans, and the display at the state park is a replica of part of one of their villages. It was staffed by several docents who were there to explain things to the tourists. We happened to arrive there shortly after a large field trip of local high school students had arrived, so there were probably 60 kids there and a male docent was explaining to them the Monacan people’s life. He was, not surprisingly, talking a lot about their methods of hunting and fishing and how they killed and ate animals for food.
As Madeleine and I were looking at some of the beautiful baskets they created, a female docent came over and we started talking about the food practices of the Monacans. There was a small plot of corn growing, and I asked her about the corn the Monacans traditionally grew and what percentage it was of their total food consumption. She replied that it was only about two percent. She told us that she is herself descended from the Monacan Indians, and that her people had traditionally set up and stayed in villages such as this one for several years, and that they would then would move to a slightly different location in the same general area, and did this repeatedly because they would gradually exhaust the local resources. I asked if she was referring to the animals who were hunted and fished, and she said no, that meat and fish accounted for less than two percent of their food. Virtually all their nutritional needs – 96 percent – came from acorns, together with nuts, berries, roots, seeds, leaves, shoots, and other plant foods that they gathered.
From what I have learned, the Monacan Indians were pretty typical of the people living here in North America before the Europeans came. Indians’ diets were overwhelmingly plant-based, as in the case of the Monacans, according to this docent, 98 percent. And yet, ironically, all the school kids visiting the Monacan Living History Village got the impression from the male docent that they subsisted primarily on meat and fish. They left the Monacan Village with a completely different message than we got, one that would reinforce their acceptance of the foods in their school lunch programs and at the local fast food restaurants, and it was in many ways forced onto them by exploiting their trust and innocence. Of course the male docent was in no way consciously exploiting the children, but was part of a process that happens inexorably—the replication of culture.
What I continue to discover is how far from reality are many of the “official stories” that we tell ourselves and teach our children. They are stories that serve a specific purpose, which is to justify the existing order, and they are passed on effortlessly and subconsciously, because they make us all comfortable in believing, in this case, that our current practice of enslaving and slaughtering huge numbers of animals for food (75 million daily in the U.S. alone) is somehow a normal and natural expression of who we are as human beings. It is no accident that we term native cultures “hunter-gatherers.”
This emphasis on “hunter” for earlier humans is chosen by the mainly male meat-eating anthropologists whose views are unconsciously filtered by their own culturally-imposed meat-eating behavior, and the deep discomfort it inevitably causes. We will and must go to great lengths to justify violent behavior, and this is an example of this.
It is long past time to question these official stories, and to create new stories that more accurately reflect the fact that plant-based foods provide us all that we need to thrive on this Earth and celebrate our lives here with wisdom and compassion. The animals of this Earth, the oceans, rivers, and ecosystems, hungry people, slaughterhouse workers, and the future generations of all living beings are certainly yearning for the day when we awaken from the indoctrinated delusions that we need meat and dairy to get adequate protein and calcium, and that the world and nonhuman animals were put here for us to use.
We are not separate from this world and from the precious web of life here. Eating the products of enslaved and murdered animals forces us to forget this, but at any moment we can question the official stories, remember the truth, and become a force for healing, peace, joy, freedom, and health for all. The ancient Lakota prayer, Mitakuye Oyasin – “All my relations” or “All are related” – reflects this fundamental human wisdom of our essential interconnectedness that is repressed by the corporate diet of death and denial.
The wisdom of the Monacan people can inspire us today if we listen deeply within and question everything.
Dr. Will Tuttle, an educator, author, pianist, and composer, presents 150 lectures, workshops, and concerts yearly throughout North America and Europe. Author of the acclaimed best-seller, The World Peace Diet, he is a recipient of the Peace Abbey’s Courage of Conscience Award, and is the co-founder of Circle of Compassion ministry. A vegan since 1980, he is a Dharma Master in the Zen tradition, and has created eight CD albums of uplifting original piano music.
The chef of the M. Wells Dinette, Hugue Dufour, who opened at MoMA PS 1 last week in New York City, is the brainchild behind a new culinary creation (one that he says he might put on his menu): horse tartar. The stunt isn’t new. Last May, the chef served a horse-meat bologna and foie gras grilled cheese sandwich at a food festival in the city. Adventure eating foodies got a perverse thrill out of it, posting pictures of the heart-stopper all over the foodie blogospere. The story has been covered by Vickery Eckhoff, who knows more about the politics of horse slaughter than anyone else. (Her stories on the topic–written for Forbes–are fantastic).
The sale of horse meat is illegal in the United States. The Dinette evidently intends to source it from Canada (where the sale and slaughter is legal), but the meat is not USDA approved, so it would still be illegal to serve it at MoMA PS1. The restaurant evidently isn’t answering phone calls nor is Mr. Dufour returning e-mails. Horse advocates–a rare breed of activist–are incensed. The restaurant’s owner declared “There is no story.” Weirdly, the media has kind of agreed (thankfully, not Eckhoff).
WHY is horse meat illegal in the US? The answer is pretty simple–-turns out horse meat poses unique health hazards to humans as a result of the the numerous drugs horses are routinely given throughout their lifetime–mostly painkillers–many of them explicitly banned by the FDA. Given what a horse destined for a slaughterhouse is dosed with throughout the course of his life, eating horse meat makes pink slime look like a healthy snack.
The irony here is that adventure-eating foodies who would never deign to eat a piece of conventionally produced steak because of all the growth hormones etc etc are, by eating horse meat, exposing themselves to a much more complex chemical cocktail of snake venom, steroids, Clenbuterol, Banamine, Ivermectin, and a host of other drugs when they sit down to Dufour’s table. These drugs make horse meat far more contaminated than beef, pork, or any other meat sold legally in the US. When horse meat is raw, the risk of exposure is especially acute.
Not to mention the ethics of this raw mess of a meal, one that I hope never makes it to Dufour’s sinister menu.
James McWilliams is a professor at Texas State University and the author of four books on food and agriculture, including Just Food: Where Locavores Get it Wrong and How We can Truly Eat Responsibly. His work appears regularly in Slate, The New York Times, Harper’s, The Washington Post, and the Atlantic.com. He blogs at his Eating Plants Blog and lives in Austin.
As the holiday season approaches in the United States, many consumers anticipate “Black Friday” (this year November 25) as a day to shop and spend wantonly. Long a token of luxury, the fur industry expects increased sales in the colder months, and will often use Black Friday as a jumping-off point. This had led many animal right groups to declare the day “Fur Free Friday” amidst a slew of protests and activism. To consumers, this may appear brash, over the top, or even ludicrous – why protest the sale of a garment, especially one with such a classic history as fur?
While vegetarianism has generally been accepted by the mainstream as “okay,” the anti-fur activist continues to be marginalized as a “radical” or “offensive.” Sure, we know that animals are killed for their fur, but so what? So are cows for leather, and pigs for pork. Such is the way of the world. It was monumental, then, when the West Hollywood City Council voted in September to ban the sale of fur, or any product made with the “hair, wool, or fur” of an animal. While furniture (leather in origin) was exempted, and the bill has an effective date in 2013, the symbolic nature of this legislation is no less grand: West Hollywood decreed what many who have researched the fur trade have known for decades, namely that the fur-farmed animals killed for clothing endure unimaginable suffering, unnaturally short lives, and filthy, inhumane conditions.
Ironically, the United States banned the import/export and sale of dog and cat fur in 2000, citing, among other things, that “the trade of dog and cat fur products is ethically and aesthetically abhorrent to United States citizens.” Indeed, a quick reflection by most citizens will support this, imaging their own pet being killed, skinned, and used for some form of clothing. But why is there an exemption for fox, mink, rabbit, and other animals? Largely, this is due to the literal trading of fur, which generated huge profits for Russia, Canada, and the United States as far back as the 1600s. While the perception of animals used for clothing, food, or entertainment has improved, most still believe that animals outside the realm of dogs and cats are available to be farmed and exploited.
“Exploited” is a relative term, and defenders of fur, particularly those who wear it, often feel that precautions are in place to protect the animal from undue harm. Unfortunately, this sort of faux (no pun intended) protection is a myth: the laws that reference fur trade and production in the United States are vague, and consistently defer to state laws instead of federal mandate. Again, the local laws fall short as most anti-cruelty measures specifically exempt animals used for fur. Indeed, the regulations are more often concerned with fur labeling rather than the treatment of the animal itself. Ignorance is bliss, however, regarding said treatment – many consumers of fur are in the dark, sometimes by the choice, of the cruelty involved at a fur farm.
A recent Photo Blog on MSNBC shows the stark reality: manual laborers, most likely dulled to the killing of countless animals, carry, process, and create the pelts that make the coats of the wealthy. Consider the animal, a mink or fox, as one as loving and similar to your dog or cat as the following is illustrated:
Each animal may self-mutilate or cannibalize as a result of stress
Each animal undergoes inbreeding to produce specific “fashionable” coat traits, inbreeding that leads to genetic defects
Each animal lacks interaction with its natural environment: grass, water to swim in, or companionship
Each animal is typically killed by being gassed, poisoned, suffocated, or severely injured, sometimes resulting in the animal being skinned alive
While fur once represented a form of commerce and clothing when no other alternative was available, it is now time for the trend and consequent cruelty to end. Faux fur, produced using synthetic textiles and “greener” materials, satisfies the need for aesthetics, while synthetic fleece made from recycled materials provide warmth and sustainability. Fashion will often dictate our mindset, but remember that we, the consumers, dictate fashion. If what we choose to wear can be obtained in a compassionate and just way, sparing the needless death of millions of animals, then we are obligated to do just that.
Samuel Hartman has traveled far and wide looking for incredible vegan food, but calls the Midwest home. Believing that food is one of the best forms of activism, Sam enjoys making delicious vegan meals for his friends while volunteering with animal rights organizations. He lives with his fiancée and two rescued French bulldogs in Louisville, KY. Amidst his goal to eradicate speciesism, he still finds to time to bike, play music, and blog. His writings can be found at thenailthatsticksup.com
Fall is my favorite season; it’s hard to like the three others as much when it’s so full of wonderful produce like pumpkins and apples! This is why I am so glad that my birthday comes around with it, I get inspired to make delicious desserts for others, and (mostly) myself, using these ingredients. I went apple picking a little ways away from where I live and had a surplus of local, organic apples; and what better way to use them then in cupcakes?
Servings: 20 Cupcakes
Ingredients For Cupcakes:
1 ½ Cups
Unbleached All Purpose Flour
1 ½ Cups Whole
Wheat Flour
2 tsp. Baking
Soda
1 tsp. Salt
1 ½ tsp.
Cinnamon
½ tsp. Nutmeg
1 Cup Oil
(Olive, Coconut, Grapeseed, Canola, etc.)
1 Cup Sugar
¾ Cup Fig Puree,
Blended Figs
1 ½ Tbsp.
Vanilla Extract
1 Tbsp. Apple
Cider Vinegar
3 Cups Chopped
Apples, about ¼” Squared
1 Cup Chopped
Pecans
Directions:
Preheat oven to
350°F. Combine flours, baking soda, salt,
cinnamon, and nutmeg in a large bowl. Sift together until there are no
chunks. In another bowl combine oil, sugar, fig puree, vanilla, and apple
cider vinegar; stir together until even and smooth.
Mix the wet
mixture into the dry mixture and combine very well, then add in the
chopped apples. The mixture will be very chunky, so take about 3 quarters
of it and place it in a food processor; pulse together until the apple
chunks are much smaller and the batter is more of a paste. Add that batter
back to the unblended portion along with the pecans and stir together.
Using an ice
cream scoop, scoop batter into cupcake pans with liners so that the batter
is about ¾ of the way up on the liner. If you are using two cupcake pans
at the same time place them on two different racks in your oven and bake
for 12 minutes, then switch racks and bake for an addition 10-12 minutes
or until your toothpick comes out clean. Set on cooling rack and continue
on to making the frosting.
Ingredients for Frosting:
2 Cups Raw
Cashews, Soaked for 2 hours or more
2 Tbsp. Maple
Syrup
1 Tbsp. Agave Nectar
2 tsp. Vanilla
Extract
¾ Cup Water
1 tsp. Cinnamon
Directions:
Place all
ingredients into a high-speed blender, and puree until very smooth. Cool
in refrigerator for 30 minutes, then spread roughly 1 Tbsp. of frosting
per cupcake.
Ingredients for Apple Chip Garnish:
2 Small Apples, Cored
and Sliced thinly
2 Tbsp. Brown
Sugar
1 tsp. Cinnamon
Directions:
Preheat oven to 350°F, place apple slices on baking sheet and
sprinkle brown sugar and cinnamon over them. Bake for 10-12 minutes or
until the edges start to curl up a little bit. Take them out to cool then
garnish the cupcakes with them.
Ed and I have so much going on with Get Healthy Marshall that we have hardly blogged this year. There are many excellent and exciting voices out there in the blogosphere that we would like to promote and share however. For this reason we are inviting guest bloggers to The Vegan Voice Blog. If you’re interested in guest blogging, just send an email to veganvoice@gmail.com. If your blog fits our criteria (vegan related, reasonably well written, and free of profanity), you’re in. Anyone who submits a blog that we use will receive an Amazon gift card to show our appreciation. We will also promote your entry mercilessly to our over 4000 social media followers.
Our first guest post comes from Jackie Sabon, the mastermind behind Vegan Yack Attack, a vegan food blog that covers everything from indulgent desserts, to healthy dinners, and even raw recipes. Jackies blog also includes restaurant reviews and a beer bit of snobbery. Not to mention her beautifully sumptuous food photos. You can find her here tomorrow - and the rest of the time at http://veganyackattack.com
What follows is an anonymous letter from an animal shelter in North Carolina. Where it’s from isn’t really relevant though, because it’s true of shelters everywhere. I volunteered years ago in animal shelters in Houston, Texas and on the island of St. Maarten in the Caribbean and it was equally true in both places. Please share this with every animal lover that you know. I beg you.
A Letter from a Shelter Manager
I think our society needs a huge “Wake-up” call. As a shelter manager, I am going to share a little insight with you all… a view from the inside if you will.
First off, all of you breeders/sellers should be made to work in the “back” of an animal shelter for just one day. Maybe if you saw the life drain from a few sad, lost, confused eyes, you would change your mind about breeding and selling to people you don’t even know.
That puppy you just sold will most likely end up in my shelter when it’s not a cute little puppy anymore. So how would you feel if you knew that there’s about a 90% chance that dog will never walk out of the shelter it is going to be dumped at? Purebred or not! About 50% of all of the dogs that are “owner surrenders” or “strays”, that come into my shelter are purebred dogs.
The most common excuses I hear are; “We are moving and we can’t take our dog (or cat).” Really? Where are you moving too that doesn’t allow pets? Or they say “The dog got bigger than we thought it would”. How big did you think a German Shepherd would get? “We don’t have time for her”. Really? I work a 10-12 hour day and still have time for my 6 dogs! “She’s tearing up our yard”. How about making her a part of your family? They always tell me “We just don’t want to have to stress about finding a place for her we know she’ll get adopted, she’s a good dog”.
Odds are your pet won’t get adopted & how stressful do you think being in a shelter is? Well, let me tell you, your pet has 72 hours to find a new family from the moment you drop it off. Sometimes a little longer if the shelter isn’t full and your dog manages to stay completely healthy. If it sniffles, it dies. Your pet will be confined to a small run/kennel in a room with about 25 other barking or crying animals. It will have to relieve itself where it eats and sleeps. It will be depressed and it will cry constantly for the family that abandoned it. If your pet is lucky, I will have enough volunteers in that day to take him/her for a walk. If I don’t, your pet won’t get any attention besides having a bowl of food slid under the kennel door and the waste sprayed out of its pen with a high-powered hose. If your dog is big, black or any of the “Bully” breeds (pit bull, rottie, mastiff, etc) it was pretty much dead when you walked it through the front door.
Those dogs just don’t get adopted. It doesn’t matter how ‘sweet’ or ‘well behaved’ they are.
If your dog doesn’t get adopted within its 72 hours and the shelter is full, it will be destroyed. If the shelter isn’t full and your dog is good enough, and of a desirable enough breed it may get a stay of execution, but not for long .
Most dogs get very kennel protective after about a week and are destroyed for showing aggression. Even the sweetest dogs will turn in this environment. If your pet makes it over all of those hurdles chances are it will get kennel cough or an upper respiratory infection and will be destroyed because shelters just don’t have the funds to pay for even a $100 treatment.
Here’s a little euthanasia 101 for those of you that have never witnessed a perfectly healthy, scared animal being “put-down”.
First, your pet will be taken from its kennel on a leash. They always look like they think they are going for a walk happy, wagging their tails. Until they get to “The Room”, every one of them freaks out and puts on the brakes when we get to the door. It must smell like death or they can feel the sad souls that are left in there, it’s strange, but it happens with every one of them. Your dog or cat will be restrained, held down by 1 or 2 vet techs depending on the size and how freaked out they are. Then a euthanasia tech or a vet will start the process. They will find a vein in the front leg and inject a lethal dose of the “pink stuff”. Hopefully your pet doesn’t panic from being restrained and jerk. I’ve seen the needles tear out of a leg and been covered with the resulting blood and been deafened by the yelps and screams. They all don’t just “go to sleep”, sometimes they spasm for a while, gasp for air and defecate on themselves.
When it all ends, your pets corpse will be stacked like firewood in a large freezer in the back with all of the other animals that were killed waiting to be picked up like garbage. What happens next? Cremated? Taken to the dump?
Rendered into pet food? You’ll never know and it probably won’t even cross your mind. It was just an animal and you can always buy another one, right?
I hope that those of you that have read this are bawling your eyes out and can’t get the pictures out of your head I deal with everyday on the way home from work.
I hate my job, I hate that it exists & I hate that it will always be there unless you people make some changes and realize that the lives you are affecting go much farther than the pets you dump at a shelter.
Between 9 and 11 MILLION animals die every year in shelters and only you can stop it. I do my best to save every life I can but rescues are always full, and there are more animals coming in everyday than there are homes.
My point to all of this DON’T BREED OR BUY WHILE SHELTER PETS DIE!
Hate me if you want to. The truth hurts and reality is what it is. I just hope I maybe changed one persons mind about breeding their dog, taking their loving pet to a shelter, or buying a dog. I hope that someone will walk into my shelter and say “I saw this and it made me want to adopt”.
When a dining companion offers you a bite of their steak so that you may “see what you’re missing” are you ever tempted to tell them that their “food” is as appealing to you as road kill? That they are eating a carcass, and the only thing you’re going to miss is having an increased risk cancer, heart disease and diabetes in the long term and suffering from indigestion and constipation in the short term. Do you want to say that eating corpses only leads to becoming one sooner yourself? Or that if you were going to choose to eat dead bodies that you would prefer to find one that died naturally so that you weren’t complicit in the slaughter of a living individual.
Okay, it’s not very diplomatic and most of us would never say those things, but you are not alone in thinking them. Almost 2000 years ago Plutarch was thinking something similar. On being asked why the Pythagoreans ate no meat he wrote:
Can you really ask what reason Pythagoras had for abstaining from flesh? For my part I rather wonder both by what accident and in what state of soul or mind the first man did so, touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, he who set forth tables of dead, stale bodies and ventured to call food and nourishment the parts that had a little before bellowed and cried, moved and lived. How could his eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and hides flayed and limbs torn from limb? How could his nose endure the stench? How was it that the pollution did not turn away his taste, which made contact with the sores of others and sucked juices and serums from mortal wounds?
My grandparents raised pigs and cattle. The old way. I remember getting in the pen with the pigs and visiting with them. They were quite social. But I grew up eating pork chops. It was a disconnect. Once I saw the connection the veil fell away and today I would no sooner eat bacon than I would this. Easter eggs are suffering chickens confined to battery cages (and balls of cholesterol filled with infectious bacteria) to me now, and ham is an animal that can outsmart my dog and save a young boy from drowning. As my cousin’s 4H pig did just a month before he was slaughtered.
The dogs were swimming with my cousin in the pond and panicked in the deep water. They started pawing him under. The pig saw this, figured out what was happening and swam out into the pond. He got between the dogs and my cousin, and swam to shore with my cousin holding on to him. A month later my cousin was forced to kill him because that’s how it is in the country. My cousin has never been the same since. He became a dark and brooding man and has had a difficult life.
Agribusiness giants ended up putting my grandparents and most other small pig farmers out of business years ago, but just because we don’t see them doesn’t mean that they aren’t intelligent, sensitive animals capable of heroic acts given the right opportunity. It just means we let strangers do the dirty work. Plutarch saw it coming nearly 2000 years ago.
Easter may symbolize something beautiful but it hides something very ugly.
Check it out! August 27th Dr. Oz will be interviewing Dr. T. Colin Campbell and Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn on the upcoming release Forks Over Knives – a documentary film chronicling the work and careers of these men in the area of nutrition and chronic disease. Dr. Campbell’s book, TheChina Studyis one of the focal points of the film. A New York Times best seller, The China Study, maybe one of the most important books ever written, reveals the causal relationship nutrition has on overall health and chronic diseases, especially cancer.
This book had the most profound impact on my life. Two-thirds into the book, I abruptly changed my diet from typical American cuisine to a whole foods plant-based diet, and never looked back. Even if you have to steel bits of time here and there to read, this is the one book you must read. I implore you – don’t miss the opportunity to read this book. You won’t be able to put it down. Available through Amazon, your local bookstore, or your local Whole Foods Market, it is a worthwhile investment in a healthy life. This is a life changing work that you will want to share with family and friends. You’ll never regret it!
October 30th, 2012 |
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