Animals  and  Pets 

        Trust Betrayed By Man

 By The Gnostic Liberation Front.
I am writing this article with tears in my eyes and a heavy
heart. Yes, those "other" creatures of God who are all around
us, but whom we hardly ever recognize as real beings, how do they fit into the total
picture of our state of awareness? Indeed, we say that God is all in all--that God is
omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient. Does this not mean that ALL is of God?
And that animals are just as much God's expression of himself as man is? If so, I
should think that this is very true as a concept and that it must be understood in its
awesome meaning to us. And it is awesome in-deed, for it is an enormous
responsibility for us to become aware-of and then to incorporate into our lives. For with
this state of consciousness--with this state of awareness comes the responsibility to
deal with animals as we would deal with human beings, and seeing in them
Life--everlasting Life--God manifesting itself as deer, horse, cow, dog, bird, cat etc.
and then treating this Life--this specific expression of God--as we would hopefully
treat another human being; with love, respect and dignity.
                                                                                     

Whoever does this is evil to the core

There is a darkness permeating this material universe which can only be lifted by man.

"Enlightened man", that is. For the carnivorous evil which embraces our very existence can

only continue as long as man is carnivorous himself. The liberation must start somewhere

and that point of "somewhere" is man on this dark planet.

          Religious Slaughter of Animals

    No wonder the world is submerged in evil!

           Hog tied in transit

            Pictures from FactoryFarming.com

                                                                                  At the slaughterhouse, cows are hung upside down, their throats are cut, and they are bled to death

VERY URGENT , IBP SLAUGHTERHOUSE !!!
HE'S BEEN SKINNED ALL THE WAY TO HIS HEAD HIS LEGS HAVE BEEN CUT OFF
..... AND HE'S STILL CONSCIOUS.....

Dear Friends ,

The Washington State Patrol, with the help of two other state agencies, hopes to conclude its investigation this month into whether slaughter or animal cruelty laws were violated at the IBP slaughterhouse. A Walla Walla County prosecutor then will decide whether to press charges.

Please write/fax/email to : 1: Attorney General Christine Gregoire. 2: Washington State Governor Gary Locke. 3: All of the Washington State Legislators.

All of their contact info is enclosed at the end of the sample letter.

The following sample letter applies to Attorney General, Governor, and all of the State Legislators . However, the "Requests" may be slightly different when addressed to different people :

(Please address to the correct people for each letter you wrote. You may modify our Sample letter in your style if you choose to.)

SAMPLE LETTER :

Subject: PLEASE PROSECUTE IBP COMPANY TO THE FULL EXTENT.

Dear Honorable Attorney General,

We would like to Request :

Please Prosecute IBP COMPANY located at Wallula, Washington State against its extreme Animal cruelty at its IBP slaughterhouse.

Atrocities are happening to thousands of cattle every week in slaughterhouses in Washington State and throughout the US, according to numerous sworn affidavits from meat industry workers. Your action against IBP COMPANY will set the First example for the country towards "Humanity" in the history of U.S. Meat industry .

If IBP Company is not prosecuted and penalized, the cruelty will continue forever... We will have no choice but to advise all of our friends, members to stop traveling to Washington State for pleasure. We will also advise all of the friends and members stop buying any of the commercial products and services made from Washington State. We will also contact our local media about the Cruelty of the Slaughterhouses continues in Washington State.

Hidden camera videotape obtained by the Humane Farming Association (HFA)-shows, among other atrocities, live cows dangling upside down from a moving conveyor, animals being trampled, and a conscious cow having an electric prod held in her mouth.

And it's not just cows that suffer in slaughterhouses. Pigs are subjected to similar abuses. Some who survive stunning are dragged through tanks of scalding water, kicking and squealing until they drown.

With animals whizzing by at the rate of one every few seconds, workers report that they cannot ensure that each animal is rendered unconscious. But workers say they'll be fired if they stop the production line.

U.S.Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman conceded on Feb 11, 1999 in an interview with C-SPAN Washington Journal that the ENFORCEMENT of the Humane Slaughter Act is almost NON-EXISTENT !

An former Veterinarian Dr. Lester Friedlander, worked for USDA for 15 years had signed affidavit and stated that :

"When the USDA issued regulations in 1979 to assure the consumer that animals were being humanely handled and slaughtered, IT WAS ONLY PAPERWORK. IT'S ONLY A BIG COVER-UP....... Because when we try to enforce the regulations at the lowest level, our supervisors in Washington start hiding. They don't want to hear anything about it. ..... They are just trying to cover themselves for the future so when they retire they can get a job as a consultant. Many of the former training officers, area supervisors, regional directors, agency administrators, Washington staff officers moved directly into industry jobs as high pay consultants......". (Please refer "Slaughterhouse" documentary book by Gail Eisnitz)

On May 31, 2000, a coalition of animal protection, consumer, and worker organizations held a press conference to further expose the IBP Slaughterhouse cruelty . Affidavits from numerous IBP-Wallula slaughterhouse workers were included with the petition. Following are part of the excerpts from some of those affidavits:

INEFFECTIVE STUNNING:

At IBP-Wallula, stun operators are often unable to render cattle unconscious, as evidenced by the following affidavits:

Affidavit #6, paragraphs 5 and 9: "There's a problem for me with knocking the cows. The chain goes too fast, more than 300 cows an hour....If I can't get the animal knocked right, it keeps going....The chain doesn't stop. It keeps running. It never stops. The cows are getting hung alive or not alive. They keep coming in. They just keep coming, coming, coming."

Affidavit #3, paragraph 7: "The problem in the knocking box is that you have to work real fast because the chain is too fast and the animals that come into the box are jumping everywhere. And sometimes...you don't shoot the cow really right. And you let him go like that. And the shacklers, they get them like that, and so they shackle them alive...."

Affidavit #4, paragraph 4: "The majority of the time, the knockers are in such a hurry that they can't knock the cows good enough. Some of the cows get up and run around chasing. When cows are hung alive on the chain, they look like they are trying to get unhooked to run."

Affidavit #3, paragraph 4: "I estimate that 30 percent of the cows are not properly knocked and get to the first legger alive....To still be alive at the second legger the cows have gone alive from the knocker to the sticker to the belly ripper (he cuts the hide down the center of the cow's abdomen) to the tail ripper (he opens the [rectum]) to the first legger (he skins a back leg and then cuts off the foot) to the first butter (he skins from the breast to the belly and a little bit on the back) to the worker who cuts off both front feet. Those cows then go to a worker who sticks a hook into the joint where the first legger took off the foot and the cows are hung from the trolley hook. I can tell that these cows are alive because they're holding their heads up and a lot of times they make noise."

Affidavit #6, paragraph 6, 7, 8: "...All the workers can open the legs, the stomach, the neck, cut off the feet while the cow is breathing. It makes noise...And the cattle go down the line for many minutes and they're still alive. They cut the legs and everything. The cattle move their eyes and their nose. They're looking around.

"Sometimes the supervisor comes and works on the live cows. They don't want workers to stop the chain, so when the live cows are really active, workers are supposed to honk the horn and the supervisor will come to help them skin the live cow....I would estimate that one out of ten cows is still alive when it's bled and skinned."

Affidavit #8, paragraph 4: "About thirty percent of the cows are still alive down the line. Sometimes more. I would see that they would be hanging there, trying to pick up their heads, they would move back and forth on the shackle, they would be blinking their eyes and looking around. You know they're alive because they are breathing real hard, they make noise, they kick the other cows, and it moves the whole chain."

WORKER INJURIES :

Affidavit #10, paragraph 3: "I got kicked in the jaw by a cow that had been knocked but it was still alive. They had already knocked the cow and it was still alive and it kicked me under the chin. I received seven stitches for that."

Affidavit #16, paragraph 23: "There are accidents because the cows are still alive. At the back hoof, the cow was kicking and it cut off one worker's three fingers. The cows are kicking and jumping and everything. And the company didn't save the fingers, so the worker lost them...."

Affidavit #17, paragraph 2: "...I had two accidents because the cows were still alive at the first legger and they kicked me in my face twice. The first time I went on nine months of light duty because I got kicked in the face. My lips were cut and my teeth were driven up into my mouth. Because of these accidents...I moved from the first leg to the second legger.... Unfortunately, the cows are still alive at the second legger."

One Washington slaughterhouse worker says : "Cows can get ten minutes down the line and still be alive. All the hide is stripped out down to the neck there." According to another, "Workers open the hide on the legs, the stomach, the neck, they cut off the feet while the cow is breathing. It makes noise. It's looking around." Still another says, "Their eyes look like they are popping out. I feel bad that I have to do my job on them." (please refer to : http://www.hfa.org )

 

 

SFLR News
The newsletter of San Francisco Liberation Radio
Sunday, April 1, 2001.

San Francisco Liberation Radio, 93.7 FM
Broadcasting 4 p.m. - 11 p.m. nightly, 12 midnight on Saturdays,
In Western San Francisco




 Broadcasting Cruelty

By Richard Edmondson

Let's see now…how can we boost our ratings and beat out the competition? I know! Let's take a pig, chop his testicles off, and broadcast the squeals over the air!

Such thinking now apparently is commonplace among the brilliant strategists at Clear Channel Communications.

The Texas-based corporation, which owns more than 1100 radio stations throughout the length and breadth of America, is apparently dissatisfied with being merely King of the Airwaves. It now would seem to be making a bid for the Grand Sultanship of Animal Cruelty. Talk about killing for profit!

When I spoke at the SFLR benefit at Cell Space on March 9, I made mention of an incident at KBPI, a Clear-Channel-owned station in Denver where a DJ had a station intern drop a live chicken off a second--and then a third--story balcony. The DJ in question, one Stephen Meade (later convicted of animal cruelty), was on the air at the time telling his audience about the chicken's reactions.

Little did I know I had only part of the story, however.

Now comes "Bubba the Love Sponge," a morning DJ at Clear-Channel-owned WXTB in Tampa, Florida.

Bubba's story is so improbable were it to be fictionalized it would be almost unbelievable.

For one thing, Bubba, formerly known as Todd Clem, had his name legally changed. He is now known officially--and legally--as "Bubba the Love Sponge Clem."

Do characters like this really exists? The answer is yes they do and some of them work for Clear Channel.

But wait. There's more.

On the February 27 edition of Bubba's morning show the station aired--live--the castration and slaughter (yes in that order) of a captured wild boar.

The Florida media, who have been having a field day with the story, have reported that the segment, dubbed "Bubba's Road Kill Barbecue," also included a contest involving the eating of the animal's testicles.

Bubba, who has whined that he has become the "pincushion" of the Tampa Bay media, was taken into custody last Thursday and charged with animal cruelty--this after a mounting nationwide campaign spearheaded by animal rights groups, including the Virginia-based People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

One Florida-based animal rights group, Animals Deserve Absolute Protection Today and Tomorrow (ADAPTT) has even gone so far as to launch a campaign to have advertisers cancel advertising on WXTB.

And what's more, they have been partially successful.

So far the Bennigans restaurant chain, J.C. Penney, Universal Studios, Disneyworld and others have cancelled ads on the station.

But ADAPTT is not content to let the matter rest there. It's three demands are:

1. Bubba's arrest (this has been accomplished) 2. Bubba's firing (so far Bubba has only undergone a brief suspension, and has since returned to work) 3. Clear Channel's adoption of a "zero tolerance" policy toward the use of animal stunts at all of its stations nationwide.

Denise Hanania, a WXTB listener who heard the broadcast and whose comments ended up posted to the ADAPTT website, described it this way.

"This morning, I heard the most horrific sounds coming from a squealing pig fighting for his life. They first hog tied him and castrated him with no anesthetics and then slit his throat. He did not die instantly, his legs still shaking as the blood rushed out of his neck. What they did next was cook him and eat him including his testicles for a contest."

Also ending up on the ADAPTT web site were color photos of the boar-killing, which had originally been posted on WXTB's web site but which were quickly taken down after the controversy broke.

Not quickly enough, as it turns out.

The photos of Bubba and company can be viewed at the following:

http://www.adaptt.org/unclearchannel/index.html

http://www.adaptt.org/unclearchannel/unclearchannelpics.html

http://www.adaptt.org/unclearchannel/unclearchannelpics2.html

By the way, ADAPTT has launched an investigation into what it says are acts of animal cruelty at other Clear Channel stations, alleging the broadcast of a steer being slaughtered at one station, and the feeding of a rabbit to a snake in another.

Some of the Florida media have offered some astute critical analyses of the whole Bubba affair, most notably Mary Jo Melone writing in the St. Petersburg Times.

"Whatever they do to Bubba -- who has made so much money he owns nightclubs and maintains a pornographic Web site -- it won't be enough. It won't put a dent in the corporate mentality that makes Bubba possible," writes Melone.

"People forget. The airwaves on which his station, 98 Rock, broadcasts are owned by the public. To have a radio license is a privilege, not a right. Because it is a privilege the federal government regulates what you can do on the radio. At least it used to.

"If a person was verbally attacked, he had a right to respond. The station had to do a certain amount of news reporting on local issues. The station had to pay attention to concepts such as equal time, fairness, and even obscenity and local community standards of taste.

"'These concepts have sort of left town,' says Neil Hickey, a media critic and editor-at-large for Columbia Journalism Review, whom I interviewed this week. 'Nobody talks about them anymore.'"

"Nobody talks about them because the laws that once made radio a civil medium were thrown out by Congress, in the name of deregulation and free speech, during the 1980s and '90s. Competition was to rule the day. Better radio was supposed to result. What resulted instead was Bubba."

After this particularly cogent analysis appeared in the St. Petersburg Times, Bubba, in a fit of petulance, demanded that his listeners cancel their subscriptions to the Times and boycott the newspapers advertisers.

The turning of the public airwaves over to louts like Bubba certainly seems to be in keeping with Clear Channel's corporate philosophy of dumbing down the population (two DJs for KYLD, one of Clear Channel's holdings in San Francisco, recently were arrested for impersonating escaped jail inmates), but even worse than that is the appalling insensitivity to the suffering of a living creature.

When I was a young boy growing up in Tennessee my parents gave me a BB gun for Christmas one year. Mostly I contented myself with bouncing BBs off of tree trunks, but one day I raised my weapon, took aim at a bird perched in the branches of a tree, and pulled the trigger--not expecting I would actually hit it, and certainly not mentally prepared for the sudden, brutal onslaught of death on that spring afternoon.

The bird--it was a bluebird--came plummeting down to Earth. In something approaching quivering astonishment I walked over and looked down at what I had so carelessly and unthinkingly wrought--and then burst into tears.

That incident went a long way toward curing me of my boyhood fascination for guns. And I further resolved that I never again wanted to kill another animal.

The willingness of a media corporation like Clear Channel to exploit the suffering of an animal for ratings says something about the state of our society, as Melone so accurately points out.

But the only reason Bubba got so much attention is that he happened to work for a radio station. The daily suffering of millions of animals in factory farms and slaughterhouses passes with little comment, and if you doubt the horrendous torture that goes on in such places, then get a copy of "Slaughterhouse" by Gail Eisnitz and read it cover to cover.

It is as inevitable as death and taxes that indifference to this kind of suffering in animals will ultimately lead to indifference to the suffering of humans.

It is certainly no coincidence that a country in which a corporation like Clear Channel reigns supreme on the public airwaves is also a country where state executions are carried out; where human hellholes like California's Pelican Bay Prison are allowed to exist; and where school yard shootings are becoming as commonplace as a day at the beach.

Little wonder then that the Tampa Tribune describes Bubba as "crude but widely popular." Most likely the advertisers will return to WXTB after an appropriate interval, for much like ancient Rome, as depicted in the Oscar-winning "Gladiator," we are a society which revels in cruelty.

And now you can hear it live over the public airwaves.

God  sees us as we see Him !