Author: Pamelyn Ferdin

The Three Biggest Killers in America

Pamelyn Ferdin Essays by Pamelyn , , , ,

Medical research is at a crossroads. The major killer diseases are not solved by old experimental techniques. In order to win against the major diseases, researchers are looking to new technologies, and doctors are forced to learn new approaches.

Heart Disease, the Number One Killer

The greatest advance in the understanding of heart disease was the discovery that it can be virtually eliminated by controlling three factors—cholesterol, smoking, and blood pressure. This extraordinary advance came from sophisticated studies of human patients.

Over the past four decades, in Framingham, Massachusetts, thousands of individuals in two generations have been carefully studied to see which factors are responsible for heart disease. The Framingham Heart Study showed that if one’s cholesterol level stays below 150, a heart attack is extremely unlikely. Every 1 percent increase in cholesterol leads to approximately a 2 percent increase in risk. Other studies, such as the Lipid Research Clinic’s Trial and the Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial, have also demonstrated the importance of controlling cholesterol levels.

Dean Ornish, M.D., of the University of California at San Francisco, has shown that if people who have advanced heart disease adopt a vegan diet, stop smoking, reduce stress, and engage in mild daily exercise, the plaques in their arteries will actually start to disappear.

Coronary artery bypasses and heart transplants, while helpful for some patients, have not matched the potency of dietary and other lifestyle measures. Bypasses and transplants develop aggressive atherosclerosis unless strict dietary steps are taken. Clearly, medicine’s best strategy is to institute such steps while the patient is still healthy. More research is needed: what we need are human behavioral studies on how to help people change long-standing smoking and dietary habits. Economic and political studies on how to shift farm production away from tobacco and livestock and toward grains, legumes, vegetables, and fruits are also essential.

Cancer, the Number Two Killer

Almost 50 years after President Nixon declared the new, aggressive “War on Cancer,” cancer death rates continue to climb.

A standard technique in the search for new anticancer drugs has been to give test substances to laboratory mice, a technique that had yielded no results relevant to humans while consuming millions of dollars and killing more than one million animals each year.

A new method developed by Michael Boyd, Robert Shoemaker, and others at the National Cancer Institute tests potential drugs on actual human tumor cells. In an automated system, the effectiveness of a substance in killing cancer cells is checked and entered into a computer. Potential drugs which have been overlooked by the pointless mouse screening system may be found to work in the new human cell screen.

Instead of struggling—and often failing—to cure established cancer, a large body of data now shows that cancer can be prevented. The National Cancer Institute estimates that as much as 80 percent of cancer cases can be prevented.

Thirty percent of cancers are due to tobacco. Avoid smoking, and lung cancer becomes very unlikely. At least 35 percent of cancers are due to dietary factors.

The National Research Council has released a technical report, Diet, Nutrition, and Cancer, showing that diet was probably the greatest single factor in the epidemic of cancer. Since then, more evidence has implicated specific dietary factors in several types of cancer. Foods rich in fats and oils increase risk of cancer in organs related to digestion (e.g., colon, rectum) and organs that are sensitive to sex hormones (e.g., breast, prostate).

In addition, certain food constituents help protect against cancer. Dietary fiber, principally found in whole grain cereals and legumes, helps prevent cancer of the colon and rectum. It also appears to reduce risk of breast cancer, perhaps by lowering cholesterol and sex hormones. Several vitamins have shown anticancer activity: beta-carotene (the form of vitamin A found in dark green and yellow vegetables and fruits), vitamins C and E, and the mineral selenium may help prevent cancer.

Avoiding excessive exposure to sunlight is a critical step in the prevention of skin cancer. In addition, radon, a natural radioactive gas that seeps up from certain underground rocks into groundwater supplies, has been implicated in certain cancers. Improved ventilation stops radon from building up in enclosed areas.

Prevention is the light at the end of the tunnel for those looking for a way to reduce the cancer epidemic. By avoiding factors that lead to cancer and including foods that strengthen us against the disease, we can, to a great extent, control our own risk.

Stroke, the Number Three Killer

In stroke, a part of the brain is killed, leading to paralysis, loss of sensory function, and often death. Clinical and epidemiologic studies have shown how stroke is caused and how it can be prevented. It has become clear that the same factors that lead to heart disease—high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol levels, and smoking—can also cause stroke. Controlling these factors can prevent stroke. To reduce the incidence of stroke, more aggressive measures to help people change dietary and smoking behavior must be developed.

 

 

Marine Parks: a Billion-Dollar Industry Built on Misery

Pamelyn Ferdin Essays by Pamelyn , , , , , , ,

In the summer of 1969, I sat for an interview on a local Los Angeles TV talk show called “Let’s Talk About.” The host of the show was Keith Walker, a sometime actor and screenwriter who would go on to write the story and screenplay for “Free Willy,” a 1993 movie about an orca who escapes from a marine park with the help of a boy. In the movie, most of Willy’s scenes were played by an animatronic orca, but some were played by a real orca named Keiko. Keiko was found by movie scouts at a run-down park in Mexico, where he lived in a tank only one foot longer than he was. The publicity from Keiko’s role in the movie led to an effort to free him back into the wild. It took until 2002, but Keiko was finally released into his native waters off Iceland. Sadly, overweight and in ill health from his years in captivity, he died one year later.

Keiko was not alone in his suffering. Aquariums and marine mammal theme parks like SeWorld in San Diego, Orlando, and San Antonio, and Miami’s Sequarium have long been a part of a billion-dollar industry built on misery. For intelligent, social animals, captivity in a marine park is a life sentence of loneliness, boredom, forced labor, and anguish.

Tilikum, a star attraction at SeaWorld Orlando, died in a concrete prison 33 years after he was taken away from his family in the cold waters off Iceland. For Lolita, torn away from her family in Washington’s Puget Sound when she was just a baby, this summer will mark a half a century in the same tank at the Miami Seaquarium. An orca named Kiska, abducted from her family as a baby, has been swimming in endless circles in a cramped tank in Canada’s MarineLand in Niagara Falls for 40 years. The most famous orca of all, Shamu, was captured after her mother was harpooned and killed and she refused to leave her mother’s body. Shamu was only nine years old when she died of septicemia from unhealthy living conditions at SeaWorld San Diego.

Frequently housed with incompatible tankmates, dolphins, whales, and other marine mammals are often drugged in order to manage stress-induced aggressive behavior and relieve the monotony of swimming in endless circles. They break their teeth chewing on the metal bars and concrete sides of their tanks and are forced to perform ridiculous and unnatural tricks for tourists in exchange for food—all in the name of “entertainment.”

While wild female orcas can live to be more than 100 years old, orcas at SeaWorld often die by the time they reach their teens and rarely approach even the average life expectancy of wild orcas. More than 40 orcas have died at SeaWorld from causes such as bacterial infections and fractured skulls. More than 300 other dolphins and whales along with approximately 400 pinnipeds (seals, sea lions, and walruses) have also died at the parks.

“Touch tanks” as well as “swim with dolphins” and “paint with dolphins” programs allow the public to pet, kiss, paint with, or even ride these animals. Such programs invade the animals’ already diminished worlds and are intrusive, stressful, and even dangerous for them, as well as being risky for human participants.

Animals in “petting pools” are frequently exposed to foreign bacteria and other pathogens, and they can become anxious, frustrated, aggressive, and even neurotic as a result of being confined to shallow tanks and exposed to constant interaction with humans. Members of the public have been injured at SeaWorld’s dolphin-petting pools.

Even programs that enable people to swim with dolphins in nature can be invasive. Boats and swimmers may chase, harass, and scare them, interfering with their natural feeding, resting, migrating, and playing behavior. Dolphins may be smart and sociable animals, but they don’t want to swim with you any more than you want a strange family to show up at your house for supper and hang around all evening.

Captive marine mammals have some federal protections in the U.S., but enforcement is lax. There are simply too many animal exhibitors for the limited number of U.S. Department of Agriculture inspectors – as of February 2020, there were only 104 inspectors for 12,851 facilities. Even when exhibitors are cited for violating the federal Animal Welfare Act, they are rarely assessed fines or meaningful penalties.

The world is moving away from keeping intelligent, sensitive cetaceans in captivity. In the U.S., the National Aquarium is building a seaside sanctuary – a safe ocean cove in which marine mammals can be released into a protected area of the sea to dive deep, feel the ocean currents, and finally live like they should, all while still receiving care, food, and veterinary support. Two whales have been moved from a marine park in China to a seaside sanctuary in Iceland, and The Whale Sanctuary Project just announced plans for a seaside sanctuary for rescued orcas and belugas in Nova Scotia, Canada.

Please don’t spend your money at marine parks and aquariums that keep ocean animals in captivity. Encourage them to create more space for rehabilitating (and releasing) injured wildlife by refusing to breed more animals. Pressure government officials not to subsidize these facilities with taxpayer money, and support legislation that prohibits the capture or restricts the display of marine mammals.

Please join me in urging SeaWorld and other marine parks to stop imprisoning animals and to relocate the orcas, bottlenose dolphins, and other animals to seaside sanctuaries, where they can thrive in the enrichment and diversity of the sea while still receiving the care that they require.

Peace to ALL the animals with whom we share this planet.

Under Cover of the Pandemic, The National Park Service Targets Baby Bears and Wolves

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With the nation’s attention conveniently distracted by the pandemic, the National Park Service is slipping through rule changes that will allow hunters in Alaskan National Wildlife Refuges to kill baby animals and their mothers in their dens, reversing existing regulations and violating every standard of conservation, decency, and compassion. I am outraged, and you should be, too.

Under the new rules, hunters will be permitted to:

  • use bait to attract and kill brown bears in federally protected lands
  • use artificial light to enter dens and kill black bears, including females and their cubs, as they hibernate
  • shoot caribou while they are swimming
  • trap and kill wolves and their pups during denning season

Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) claims the new rules are a matter of “principle” and protecting states’ rights. “Principle” is not something normally associated with Sen. Sullivan or those who encourage killing living beings for fun and recreation. Killing for sport is an abomination and the slaughter of sleeping mothers and their young is as evil as it gets. It certainly has no place in our National Wildlife Refuges.

Former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke drafted the new rule before resigning in disgrace in 2018 in the face of no fewer than 17 federal ethics investigations, but the anti-animal, anti-environment federal administration pushed it through. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) has led more than 70 of her colleagues in Congress in demanding the rule be withdrawn.

“The proposed rule would roll back critical protections for America’s beloved, rare and iconic native carnivores, including brown bears, black bears and wolves on the approximately 20 million acres of national preserves in Alaska—land that belongs to all Americans,” wrote the lawmakers. “The rule would effectively endorse the state of Alaska’s efforts to use extreme practices to reduce bear and wolf populations in order to artificially inflate populations of prey species for sport hunting.”

Zinke’s successor, David Bernhardt, had the opportunity to halt the rule changes but chose instead to ignore common sense and opposition by members of Congress, scientists, and tens of thousands of Americans. Said Theresa Pierno, president of the National Parks Conservation Association, “Shooting hibernating mama and baby bears is not the conservation legacy that our national parks are meant to preserve and no way to treat or manage park wildlife.”

I urge everyone to contact their representatives in the Senate and House of Representatives NOW and express your outrage and opposition to the National Park Service rule changes. Preserving wildlife, especially baby animals and their mothers, should not be a matter of political ideology but one of basic morality. This is an urgent call to save lives and preserve what’s left of our national decency.

Peace to ALL the animals with whom we share this planet.

Living in Lockdown Is a Lifelong Thing for Zoo Animals

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Lonely, bored, feeling disconnected from the world during the pandemic? Imagine living your whole life feeling that way. Zoo animals do.

Even the most well-intentioned zoos are nothing more than animal prisons. Captive animals are often prevented from doing most of the things that are natural and important to them, like running, roaming, flying, climbing, foraging, choosing a partner, and being with others of their own kind. Zoos teach people that it is acceptable to interfere with animals and keep them locked up in captivity, where they are bored, cramped, lonely, deprived of all control over their lives, and far from their natural homes.

Zoos vary in size and quality—from drive-through parks to small roadside menageries with concrete slabs and iron bars. Millions of people visit zoos annually, but most zoos operate at a loss and must find ways to cut costs or add gimmicks that will attract visitors. Precious funds that should be used to provide more humane conditions for animals are often squandered on cosmetic improvements—such as landscaping, refreshment stands, and gift shops—in order to draw visitors.

Ultimately, animals—and sometimes visitors—are the ones who pay the price. A gorilla named Jabari tried to escape from the Dallas Zoo by jumping over walls and moats and evading electrified wires, only to be fatally shot by police; a witness later reported that teenagers were taunting the animal with rocks prior to his escape. At the Virginia Zoo, ten prairie dogs died when their tunnel collapsed, a rhinoceros drowned in the moat of her exhibit, and a zebra lost her life when she bolted from a holding pen, struck a fence, and broke her neck. Gus, a polar bear living at the Central Park Zoo in New York, made international headlines when he exhibited signs of severe depression after losing his mate of more than 20 years. Gus died two years later of a thyroid tumor, but one could say he was already dying of a broken heart.

Most zoo enclosures are very small, and rather than promoting respect for or understanding of animals, signs often provide little more information than an animal’s species, diet, and natural range. Animals’ normal behavior is seldom discussed, much less observed, because their natural needs are rarely met. Birds’ wings may be clipped so that they cannot fly, aquatic animals often go without adequate water, and many animals who naturally live in large herds or family groups are kept alone or, at most, in pairs. Natural hunting and mating behaviors are virtually eliminated by regulated feeding and breeding regimens. Animals are closely confined, lack privacy, and have little opportunity for mental stimulation or physical exercise. These conditions often result in abnormal and self-destructive behavior, known as “zoochosis.” Zoo animals can often be seen pacing, walking in tight circles, swaying or rolling their heads, and showing other signs of psychological distress. This behavior is symptomatic of not just boredom but also profound despondency.

Zoos claim a mission of protecting species from extinction, but zoo officials usually favor exotic or popular animals—who draw crowds and publicity—rather than threatened or endangered local wildlife. The Chinese government, for example, “rents” pandas to zoos worldwide for fees of more than one million dollars per year, but there is some question whether the profits are being directed, as they claim, toward panda-conservation efforts. Most animals housed in zoos are not endangered, and those which are will likely never be released into their natural habitats. Endangered species will only be saved by preserving habitats and combating the reasons these animals are being killed by human hunters and poachers.

Zoos will also tell you they are places for research; however, the purpose of most zoos’ research is to find ways to breed and maintain more animals in captivity. It’s a corrupt and endless cycle.

With informative television programming, educational opportunities on the Internet, and the relative ease of travel, learning about or viewing animals in their natural habitats is possible no matter where you live or what your circumstances. The idea of keeping animals cruelly confined behind bars or plexi-glass for human entertainment is thoroughly obsolete.

 

Remembering Fred Willard, Friend of Animals

Pamelyn Ferdin Essays by Pamelyn , ,

Comedian Fred Willard, who died on Friday, was a fellow guest on “The Woody Woodbury Show” the afternoon I made my talk show debut in 1967. Something else he and I had in common was that he was a longtime advocate for animal rights. Willard created and starred in many public service announcements on behalf of animals that entertain while educating, including these about the intelligence and feelings of animals as well as the importance of spaying and neutering and adopting animals from shelters.

Fish Have Feelings

Fish Don’t Get the Respect They Deserve

Animal Birth Control

Adopt, Don’t Buy

Farm Sanctuary

Peace to ALL the animals with whom we share this planet.

Tired of Isolation? For Billions of Animals, This Is Their Entire Existence

Pamelyn Ferdin Essays by Pamelyn , , , ,

Shelter-in-place restrictions, closed businesses and public spaces, and reduced social interaction has found us confronting unfamiliar feelings of alienation and isolation. Many people are disoriented by the sense of being estranged from their own lives.

Weeks or months of isolation necessary to inhibit the spread of the COVID-19 virus can be uncomfortable, but we know this disruption in our lives is only temporary. Try to imagine, if you can, the depths of isolation our society routinely inflicts on so many of our fellow beings – the nonhuman animals we breed or capture for our exploitation. For the animals languishing on farms, in zoos, vivisection laboratories, aquariums, circuses, pet stores, breeding mills, kill shelters, alienation and loneliness is the very essence of their existence, and a permanent condition.

It is widely believed that COVID-19 jumped to humans via the animal flesh trade, which has led to a critical focus on wildlife and “wet” markets. Deservedly so, but we must not forget that factory farms and meat packing plants remain the largest sources of human zoonotic disease pandemics. A 2012 study mapping human diseases that come from animals found that “while zoonoses can be transmitted to people by either wild or domesticated animals, most human infections are acquired from the world’s 24 billion livestock, including pigs, poultry, cattle, goats, sheep and camels.”

The World Health Organization confirms that the greatest risk for zoonotic disease transmission occurs at the human-animal interface through direct or indirect human exposure to animals, their products (meat, milk, eggs, etc.) and/or their environments, while the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization notes that “seventy percent of the new diseases that have emerged in humans over recent decades are of animal origin and, in part, directly related to the human quest for more animal-sourced food.”

Just a decade ago, swine flu, an H1N1 influenza virus, jumped from farmed pigs to humans and infected nearly 61 million people in the U.S. alone, where it resulted in 12,469 deaths, according to The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Worldwide, as many as 284,500 people were killed by the swine flu pandemic.

The infamous 1918 influenza pandemic was also caused by an H1N1 virus. Attributed to having developed from either a swine flu or avian flu virus on a pig or poultry farm (pre-dating factory farms, it should be noted), the pandemic killed an estimated 50 million people around the world.

All this is just the tip of the iceberg.

While pandemics are tragic, they are not inevitable. In the grand scheme of things, they are symptoms of a much deeper sickness with which we have infected not only ourselves, but whose toxic consequences can now be seen across the globe. Witness the burning of the Amazon rainforest to make room for ever more cattle ranching. See Australia, where the ceaseless bulldozing of koala habitat and the deliberate mass killing of kangaroos, both on behalf of the beef industry, kill far more of these animals every year than the recent wildfires. See, too, the unprecedented rates of species extinction resulting from habitat loss, whose number one driver is animal agriculture; the climate crisis to which meat and dairy production contribute more greenhouse gas emissions than all global transport combined, leading to devastating droughts, floods, fires, hurricanes, and other extreme weather events.

This sickness is not the scale of our killing but in the mentality that views animals not as fellow beings but as resources to be farmed and consumed. Humans have thrown out the order of nature and taken it upon themselves to decide where animals will live, if they may reproduce and how and when, if the children they bear will ever see their mothers, when or if they may be allowed to socialize with their own species. What, when, and how much they will eat, what mutilations they will be subjected to, and, to a great extent, when and how they will die.

What can it mean that, in a society obsessed with personal identity and freedom, we have erased the very concepts of identity, liberty, autonomy, and consent from entire populations of sentient individuals. We give little or no thought to the moral implications of the indignity and debasement we inflict on them for our own profit and pleasure. To degrade any individual, much less entire species, to the lifelong status of property, captive, and commodity, is the grossest devaluing of life, and the ultimate alienation.

Farmed animals are the innocent victims of our arrogant and ignorant species. They do not “live” as we know and value the word; they endure an existence. They are powerless, brought into the world by violation on an industrial scale for the sole purpose of gratifying human indulgence.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We can thrive without causing this devastating harm.

It is no coincidence that our systematic destruction of animal lives is also destroying our own. As I write this, U.S. slaughterhouses and meat processing plants have been identified as the largest hotspot for coronavirus infection in the country. Instead of shutting them down to stop the spread of this killer virus, an executive order is forcing them to stay open to supply our society’s fetish for flesh. Headlines fan the fears of “mass meat shortage” that threaten to starve us all. News flash: it won’t. There are more than enough things to eat that aren’t hacked off the corpses of animals.

Our culture is in a state of addiction. It is pathological. And it is wrecking our planet, which ought to be incidental to the immorality of force-breeding billions of sentient individuals into captivity, reproductive subjugation, and slaughter. Lives are not commodities; beings are not property.

Until we divest from this poisonous sense of entitlement, this blood-soaked stupor of violence, exploitation, and consumption, our species is doomed.

Peace to ALL the animals with whom we share this planet.

Cage-Free, Free Range, Organic: All Labels for Suffering and Murder

Pamelyn Ferdin Essays by Pamelyn , , , ,

Every time you buy a carton of eggs – conventional, free-range, cage-free, organic, “certified humanely raised,” or whatever label is put on them – you are paying for the murder of hundreds of millions of baby chicks, 200 million each year in the United States alone. They are thrown in a dumpster and left to die, tossed in garbage bags and suffocated, or more commonly, ground up alive in industrial meat grinders. Why does this happen, you ask?  Wouldn’t it be more profitable to let them grow up and kill them for meat?

Actually, no. It takes a lot of food, shelter and water to raise a chick into a full-grown chicken. Male chickens simply will not grow as big or as fast as female chickens. They also don’t lay eggs. To egg farmers, male chickens are a liability that eat into profits, so they cut their losses early and “humanely euthanize” (i.e. grind up) baby chicks that are only a day old.

Though the males die a relatively quick death, the females will live their entire lives crammed six to a cage so small they can’t stand up or turn around. Chickens are treated as egg-laying machines with no regard for their basic biological and behavioral needs. They are “debeaked,” meaning their beaks are nearly cut off so they can’t peck at each other. Many are put through periods of starvation to force them to molt, which will boost their egg-laying productivity. These hens’ natural life span of 15-20 years is cut drastically short, living only one to two years before they are slaughtered when their productivity declines. Their bodies are so wasted and emaciated that their meat is only able to be used in soups and pet food.

Do you see the phrase “cage-free eggs” and imagine they come from hens wandering free in a sunny barnyard? Think again. “Cage-free” chickens are kept not six to a small cage but packed in giant warehouses. They are still debeaked and still sent to the slaughterhouse when their egg-laying productivity declines.

The label “free-range eggs” sounds much better, doesn’t it? It’s not. It’s simply another marketing ploy. In the words of the USDA, “free-range” birds are “raised in heated and air-cooled growing houses with access to the outdoors.” That “outdoor area” is typically a small covered porch or patio with a cement floor, accessed through a small, hard-to-find door. There is nothing “cruelty-free” about getting to spend a few minutes a day on a crowded cement patio where the sunlight never reaches. Once again, the chickens are debeaked, forced to live in their own waste, fed the same antibiotic and arsenic-laden feed that other chickens eat, and are still slaughtered in ways that will make your blood turn cold. Remember: free-range chickens are far from free, and they don’t live on a range.

Organic eggs come from chickens that are fed a certified organic, vegetarian diet (though chickens’ natural diet is not strictly vegetarian). There is still no barnyard or pasture, no space to roam free, and often no sunlight, and the living conditions are still far from cruelty-free. USDA regulations permit egg farmers to confine their hens 24 hours a day if they feel that the weather is too harsh, that there may be a disease outbreak, or to protect soil and water from being contaminated by all of the waste inherent in the keeping of thousands of chickens. There are no clear regulations on any of these factors, and because they are left completely to the farmer’s discretion, are almost never regulated or enforced in any way.

“Certified organic,” “free-range,” “cage-free,” “hormone-free,” “all natural,” “humanely raised and handled” — all of these labels are cynically designed to make consumers feel less guilty about buying a product that is always cruel. Don’t allow yourself to be manipulated by meaningless labels, and stop paying for the suffering and slaughter of innocent animals.

Peace to ALL the animals with whom we share this planet.

More Information on COVID-19 and Pandemics

Pamelyn Ferdin Essays by Pamelyn , , , , , ,

More information on COVID-19 and pandemics you may not know:

It’s easy for those of us in the Western world to shake our heads at the gruesome wildlife (wet) markets in China that are the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic now paralyzing the globe. But what’s more difficult is to be honest with ourselves about what kinds of pandemics may be brewing through our own practice of eating animals.

And while the new coronavirus, crippling as it is, might have a fatality rate (proportion of those infected who die) greater than four percent, this catastrophe may be just a dress rehearsal for an even more serious pandemic that could take a more gruesome toll, akin to the 1918 global flu pandemic, which originated in a Kansas slaughterhouse and killed 50 million people.

When that day comes, it’s very likely that such a virus will also have its origin in humanity’s seemingly insatiable desire to eat animals, wild or domestic. The atrocious conditions in which we raise animals today – crowding tens of thousands of animals wing-to-wing or snout-to-snout – serve as amplifiers for viral pandemics.

Indeed, the H1N1 swine flu outbreak of 2009 originated in a pig confinement operation in North Carolina. Factory farms like this cut pigs’ tails off without any anesthesia; thousands slowly die from blood loss. The pigs are stuffed into crates so small they can’t even turn around. Many die from thirst during transport in trucks packed so tightly that those who collapse or die are trampled by others who, in desperation, frantically seek escape.

And while the H5N1 bird flu outbreak in 1997 (case fatality rate: 60 percent) originated in a Chinese chicken factory farm, a similar bird flu in the U.S. just five years ago led American chicken farmers to kill tens of millions of their birds to contain the outbreak. And at this very moment, both India and China have announced bird flu outbreaks originating in chicken factories.

Chickens, like pigs, are tortured in factory farms, crammed so tightly into cages they peck at each other in despair and madness. To combat this, factory farmers mutilate the chickens with a machine that holds them by the head and slices off their beaks with a hot metal blade. As often as not, the blade cuts too close and millions of chickens starve to death.

But you can only play viral Russian roulette for so long, which is why public health experts concerned about zoonotic diseases have for years been ringing the alarm about the industrial farming of animals. Michael Greger, author of Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching, calls factory farming a “perfect storm environment” for infectious diseases. “If you actually want to create global pandemics,” he warns, “then build factory farms.”

A 2007 editorial in the American Journal of Public Health on the topic worried that our mass raising and slaughtering of animals for food could be the genesis of the next big global pandemic. Given the connection between industrial animal agriculture and pandemic risk, the editorial observed, “We need to change the way humans treat animals – most basically ceasing to eat them.”

Such a prescription in 2007 might have seemed off the radar as it would have appeared simply too unrealistic. Today, however, technological progress has made it easier to imagine taking the public health experts’ advice more seriously.

Yes, we humans may crave meat, but our concept of “meat” is now becoming far more diverse than in the past. Whereas “protein” was once synonymous with a hunk of flesh from a once-living animal’s body, today many Americans are embracing a type of plant protein that mimics the taste of flesh. There’s the success of plant-based meat alternatives, for example, which are now a popular part of fast food chains’ menus across the country. Many forward-thinking meat companies have even released their own plant-based meat alternative offerings, too. Today’s plant-based meats have all the taste and texture of anything you can find in animal form. You like burgers, sausages, chicken nuggets? There is an almost endless variety of delicious and easy to find meatless product out there. There are plenty of dairy and cheese alternatives too. Looking for something to do while you’re at home? Check them out and find the ones you like the best. You can also purchase through Amazon any number of vegan recipe books.

Whether the concern is climate change, antibiotic resistance, deforestation, animal welfare, or more, the benefits of leaving off the eating of animals and getting our protein source from a plant-based diet, is imperative.

As we hunker down and weather the corona storm now hitting the world, let us take some of our downtime to contemplate that we have the power to reduce the chance of the next pandemic. Wet markets in Asia and elsewhere MUST be shut down, but let’s not stop there. If we have the will to shut down our entire society for weeks on end, surely we have the will to change our diets.

No one NEEDS to eat animals, and together we can “do no harm” to our animal friends and stop inflicting deadly pandemics on ourselves.

Peace to ALL the animals with whom we share this planet.

Their Wet Market Is Our Factory Farm

Pamelyn Ferdin Essays by Pamelyn , , , ,

This is a follow-up to my March 27 essay about the roots of COVID-19 and other deadly viruses in the abuse, slaughter, and eating of animals.

The writing has been on the wall for years. Animal agriculture, in all of its manifestations — from the disembowelment of pigs to the bloodthirsty “sport” of hunting — is a ticking time bomb. Amid the Coronavirus pandemic, I continue to be stunned by the lack of serious reporting on the source of the problem. Finally, after weeks of sparse coverage, we are beginning to see the issue come to light through figures that have captured the world’s attention, like Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who stated that “It boggles my mind how when we have so many diseases that emanate out of that unusual human-animal interface, that we don’t just shut it down. I don’t know what else has to happen to get us to appreciate that.”

Since the pandemic began, experts have commented on this connection between animal agriculture and disease outbreaks. What do they say?

“Zoonotic viruses almost always leap to humans directly from our livestock or from wildlife, the slaughter and hunting of which bring susceptible human hosts in particularly close contact with live animals and their infected tissues and fluids. Both farmed and caged wild animals create the perfect breeding ground for zoonotic diseases.” – Liz Specht, PhD, associate director of science and technology at the Good Food Institute. (Wired)

“We invade tropical forests and other wild landscapes, which harbor so many species of animals and plants — and within those creatures, so many unknown viruses. We cut the trees; we kill the animals or cage them and send them to markets. We disrupt ecosystems, and we shake viruses loose from their natural hosts. When that happens, they need a new host. Often, we are it.” — David Quammen, science writer and author of “Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic.” (New York Times)

“If we want to forestall the evolution of ever-newer, and possibly deadlier, human-adapted viruses, live animal markets must be permanently shut down. Until the Chinese government outlaws these markets, until factory farms housing millions of animals are eliminated, until we take the inevitable logic of disease evolution into account, novel, and potentially deadly, human diseases will continue to arise. Again. And again. And again.”  — Wendy Orent, an anthropologist specializing in health and pandemics, author of author of “Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World’s Most Dangerous Disease” and “Ticked: The Battle Over Lyme Disease in the South.”

“It’s [viral pandemics] about the way we are pushing into the last wild spaces on our planet. When we burn and plow into the Amazon rainforest so that we can have cheap land for ranching, when the last of the African bush gets converted to farms, when wild animals in China are hunted to extinction, human beings come into contact with wildlife populations that they have never come into contact with before…. So as long as we keep making our remote places less remote, the outbreaks are going to keep coming.” – Global health expert Alanna Shaikh. (TED)

Those are just a few. If humans are to survive on this planet, consideration must be given to the roots of the pathogens that threaten to wipe us all out. They’re out there, and they will find their way here. Unless we change the way we live with animals, no amount of soap and hand sanitizer is going to save us.

Peace for ALL the animals with whom we share this planet!

At the Root of Deadly Pandemics Is the Human Appetite for Animals

Pamelyn Ferdin Essays by Pamelyn , , , ,
In the spring of 1971 I shut down the production of the TV movie “The Forgotten Man” for three days by coming down with the stomach flu, and once I filmed a Barbie commercial when I was sick, throwing up between every take. I suffered a bit then, but those illnesses were not that serious. Amid the global outbreak of the very serious COVID-19 virus, I am doing what I can to stay safe by washing my hands, social distancing, and relying only on credible scientific sources for the truthful information and advisories. I hope you all are doing the same.

The source of the outbreak is believed to be a wet market in Wuhan, China. In a wet market, all kinds of animals, live and dead, are for sale. Fish packed into shallow tubs splash water all over the floor. The floors and counter tops of stalls are slick and red with the blood of animals, killed, skinned and gutted as customers watch. Live turtles and crustaceans climb over each other in desperate bids to escape filthy plastic boxes. Birds and mammals scream. Sick and wounded animals crammed into small cages stacked high drip blood, pus, feces, and urine onto other animals in cages below. In the eyes of all of them there is misery and terror. Water, blood, fish scales and animal guts are everywhere. Melting ice adds to the slush on the floor. As the name implies, things are very wet at the wet market.

While wet markets can be found in many countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, researchers of zoonotic diseases — diseases that jump from animals to humans – pinpoint the wet markets in mainland China as particularly problematic for several reasons. First, these markets often have many different kinds of animals – some wild, some domesticated but not necessarily native to that part of Asia. Many of the customers who visit these markets have developed a pretentious taste for exotic animals – including dogs, bats, pangolins, African serval cats, fennec foxes from the Sahara, marmosets from South America, blue-tongued lizards, iguanas, monkeys, Australian cockatoos, African meerkats, ferrets, rare tortoises, porcupines, snakes and skunks. These rare and beautiful animals can be found at wet markets side by side with pigs, sheep, and chickens waiting to be killed and disemboweled or boiled alive before being eaten. The stress of captivity and imminent death in these chaotic markets weakens the animals’ immune systems and creates an environment where viruses from different species can mingle, swap bits of their genetic code and spread from one species to another, according to biologists and epidemiologists. When that happens, a new strain of virus gets a foothold in humans and an outbreak like this current coronavirus erupts.

China closed over 20,000 wet markets in February, but markets being run by crime syndicates are still selling animals across Asia with impunity. These places of filth and death as well as hotbeds for disease are still operating in Thailand, Indonesia, Laos, Cambodia and Burma, where millions of dollars are being made in the shipping and trading of “exotic meat” and wildlife. These and all wet markets are a time bomb of coronavirus risk.

For years, scientists have warned that filthy markets crammed full of sick animals are breeding grounds for new, antibiotic-resistant “superbugs.” Some studies claim that by 2050, more people will be dying from antibiotic-resistant diseases than from cancer. What the world is witnessing in horror in 2020 may be someday be common. If we want to stop the next pandemic, there’s going to have to be truly a global attempt to shut these markets down.

The United Nations has found that 70% of new human diseases were directly linked to animals used for food. The World Health Organization has concluded that the consumption of processed meat contributes to the development of cancer. Research as shown that a diet free of animal products dramatically reduces the risk of many chronic degenerative diseases and conditions, including heart disease, cancer, obesity, hypertension, and type 2 diabetes. In other words, a vegan diet is not only better for human health but for the health and survival of animals.

Deadly viruses, devastating forest fires, accelerating climate change – the farming and eating of animals has apocalyptic consequences. Friends of the meat industry and deniers with motives of their own will claim otherwise, but the truth is, we cannot expect to continue living on planet Earth if we continue to eat animals. It’s really that simple: saving human lives comes down to saving animal lives. The easiest thing that you can do for your own health and the world we live in is to go vegan right now and persuade everyone you know to do the same.

An urgent reminder: Pets CANNOT contract COVID-19 or give it to you; don’t dump your animal companions at shelters where they will be killed.

Peace to all the animals with whom we share this planet.