Sea Shepherd

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

A Very Inconvenient Truth - by Capt Paul Watson

A Very Inconvenient Truth - by Capt Paul Watson


The meat industry is one of the most destructive ecological industries
on the planet. The raising and slaughtering of pigs, cows, sheep,
turkeys and chickens not only utilizes vast areas of land and vast
quantities of water, but it is a greater contributor to greenhouse gas emissions
than the automobile industry.

The seafood industry is literally plundering the ocean of life and some
fifty percent of fish caught from the oceans is fed to cows, pigs,
sheep, chickens etc in the form of fish meal. It also takes about fifty
fish caught from the sea to raise one farm raised salmon.

We have turned the domestic cow into the largest marine predator on the
planet. The hundreds of millions of cows grazing the land and farting
methane consume more tonnage of fish than all the world's sharks,
dolphins and seals combined. Domestic housecats consume more fish,
especially tuna, than all the world's seals.

So why is it that all the world's large environmental and
conservation groups are not campaigning against the meat industry? Why did Al
Gore's film Inconvenient Truth not mention the inconvenient truth that
the slaughter industry creates more greenhouse gases than the automobile
industry?

The Greenpeace ships serve meat and fish to their crews everyday. The
World Wildlife Fund does not say a word about the threat that meat
eating poses for the survival of wildlife, the habitat destroyed, the wild
competitors for land eliminated, or the predators destroyed to save
their precious livestock. .

When I was a Sierra Club director for three years, everyone looked
amused when I brought up the issue of vegetarianism. At each of our Board
meeting dinners, the Directors were served meat and only after much
prodding and complaining did the couple of vegetarian directors manage to
get a vegetarian option. At our meeting in Montana we were served
Buffalo and antelope, lobsters in Boston, crabs in Charleston, steak in
Albuquerque etc. But what else can we expect from a “conservation� group
that endorses trophy hunting.

As far as I know and I may be wrong, but my organization, the Sea
Shepherd Conservation Society is the only conservation organization in the
world that endorses and practises vegetarianism. My ships do not serve
meat or fish ever, nor do we serve dairy products. We've had a
strictly vegan menu for years and no one has died of scurvy or malnutrition.

The price we pay for this is to be accused by other conservation
organizations of being animal rights. Like it's a bad word. They say
it with the same disdain that Americans used to utter the word
communist in the Fifties.

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is not an animal rights
organization. We are exclusively involved in interventions against illegal
activities that threaten and exploit marine wildlife and habitat. We are
involved in ocean wildlife conservation activities.

Yet because we operate our ships as vegan vessels, other groups, and
now the media dismiss us as an animal rights organization.

Now first of all I don't see being accused of as an animal rights
organization to be an insult. PETA was co-founded by one of my
crew-members and many of my volunteers come from the animal rights movement. But
it is not accurate to refer to Sea Shepherd as animal rights when our
organization pushes a strict conservation enforcement policy.

And secondly we do not promote veganism on our ships because of animal
rights. We promote veganism as a means of practising what we preach
which is ocean conservation.

There is not enough fish in the world's oceans to feed 6.6 billion
human beings and another 10 billion domestic animals. That is why all the
world's commercial fisheries are collapsing. That is why whales,
seals, dolphins and seabirds are starving. The sand eel for example, the
primary source of food for the comical and beautiful puffin is being
wiped out by Danish fishermen solely to provide fish meal to Danish factory
farmed chickens.

This is a solid conservation connection between eating meat and the
destruction of life in our oceans.

In a world fast losing resources of fresh water, it is sheer lunacy to
have hundreds of millions of cows consuming over 1,000 gallons of water
for every pound of beef produced.

And the pig farms in North Carolina produce so much waste that it has
contaminated the entire ground water reserves of the entire state. North
Carolinians drink pig shit with their water but its okay they say, they
just neutralize it with chemicals like chlorine.

Most people don't want to see where their meat comes from. They also
don't want to know what the impact of their meat has on the ecology.
They would rather just deny the whole thing and pretend that meat is
something that comes in packages from the store.

But because there is this underlying guilt always present, it manifests
itself as anger and ridicule towards people who live the most
environmentally positive life styles on the planet – the vegans and the
vegetarians.

This is demonstrated through constant marginalization especially in the
media. Any organization, like Sea Shepherd for example, that points out
the ecological contradictions of eating meat is immediately dismissed
as some wacko animal rights organization.

I did not set the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society up as an animal
rights organization and we have never promoted animal rights in the
organization. What we have promoted and what we do is oceanic wildlife and
habitat conservation work.

And the truth is that you can't practise solid and constructive
conservation work without promoting veganism and/or vegetarianism as
something that promotes the conservation of resources.

A few years ago I attended a dinner meeting of the American Oceans
Campaign hosted by Ted Danson. He opened the dinner by saying that the
choice he had to make was between fish and chicken for the dinner, and what
was the point of saving fish if you can't eat them?

Guest speaker, Oceanographer Sylvia Earle put Ted in his place by
saying she did not think that he was being very funny. She said that she
considered fish to be her friends and she did not believe in eating her
friends. So neither Sylvia nor I ate dinner that night.

I met Sylvia again at another meeting, this time of Conservation
International held at some ritzy resort in the Dominican Republic. Harrison
Ford was there and the buzz was what could be done to save the oceans. I
was invited as an advisor. I sat on a barstool in an open beachfront
dining plaza as the conservationists approached tables literally
bending from the weight of fish and exotic seafood including caviar. I
looked at Sylvia Earle and she just shook her head and rolled her eyes.

The problem is that people like Carl Pope, the Executive Director of
the Sierra Club, or the heads of Greenpeace, World Wildlife Fund,
Conservation International and many other big groups just refuse to accept
that their eating habits may be just as much a part of the problem as all
those things they are trying to oppose.

I remember one Greenpeacer defending his meat eating by saying that he
was a carnivore and that predators have their place and he was
proud to be one.

Now the word predator in relationship to human beings has a rather
scary connotation having nothing to do with eating habits, but for any
human being to describe themselves as a carnivore is just plain ridiculous.

Humans are not and have never been carnivores. A lion is a carnivore as
is a wolf, as is a tiger, or a shark. Carnivores eat live animals. They
stalk them, they run them down, they pounce, they kill, and they eat,
blood dripping, meat at body temperature. Nature, brutal red in tooth
and claw.

I've never met a human that can do that. Yes we found ways to run
down animals and kill them. In fact we've come to be rather efficient at
the killing part. But we can't eat the prey until we cut it up and
cook it and that usually involves some time between kill and eating. It
could be an hour or it could be years.

You see our meat eating habits are more closely related to the vulture,
the jackal or other carrion eaters. This means that we can't be
described as carnivores. We are better described as necrovores or eaters of
rotting flesh.

Consider that some of the beef that people eat has been dead for months
and in some cases for years. Dead and hanging in freezers, full of
uritic acid and bacteria. It's a corpse in a state of decomposition. Not
much that can be said to be noble about eating a cadaver.

But a little dose of denial allows us to bite into that Big Mac or cut
into that prime rib.

But that one 16 ounce cut of prime rib is equal to a thousand gallons
of fresh water, a few acres of grass, a few fish, a quarter acre of corn
etc. What's the point of taking a shorter shower to conserve water as
Greenpeace is preaching if you can sit down and consume a 1000 gallons
of water at a single meal?

And that single cut of meat would have cost as much in vegetable
resources equivalent to what could be fed to an entire African village for a
week.

The problem is that we choose to see our contradictions when it is
convenient for us to see them and when it is not we simply go into a state
of suspended disbelief and we eat that steak anyway because, hey we
like the taste of rotting flesh in the evening.

Have you ever thought why it is that with a person, it’s an abortion
but when it comes to a chicken, it's an omelette?

Does anyone really know what's in a hot dog? We do know that the
government health department allows for an acceptable percentage of bug
parts, rodent droppings and other assorted filth to go into the mix.

And now tuna fish comes with a health warming saying it should not be
eaten by pregnant women or small children because of high levels of
mercury. Does that mean mercury is good for adults and non-pregnant women?
What are they telling us here?

Eating meat and fish is not only bad for the environment it's also
unhealthy. Yet even when it comes to our own health we slip into denial
mode and order the whopper.

The bottom line is that to be a conservationist and an
environmentalist, you must practise and promote vegetarianism or better yet veganism.

It is the lifestyle that leaves the shallowest ecological footprint,
uses fewer resources and produces less greenhouse gas emissions, it's
healthier and it means you're not a hypocrite.

In fact a vegan driving a hummer would be contributing less greenhouse
gas carbon emissions than a meat eater riding a bicycle.

May be freely distributed, reproduced and published with permission of
the writer.

Sunday, September 26, 2010

Top Ten Anti-Cancer foods

The Top 10 anti-cancer foods


The most powerful anti-cancer food of all is, of course, a daily helping of seafood - for the complete range of the 72+ natural trace elements, without which we cannot help but sicken - and worse.
The complete natural range of the 72 trace elements is the best anti-cancer food there is. This is the reason why the breast cancer rate is 21 times lower, the lung cancer rate is 36 times lower, the prostate cancer rate is 137 time lower, and the colon cancer rate 187 times lower among the Sinhalese, and most likely, the people of India as well. Unlike Sri Lanka, India does not have a public health care system, hence the lack of figures for India.

Nevertheless, the nutritional customs are all but identical in these two countries, and while some Indian agriculture has switched to the trace element deficient Western chemical methods, much of their agriculture still returns all life wastes to the soil - and with them, the 72 trace elements. And China is not far behind the Sinhalese, with basically the same agricultural situation.

So, since seafood is the only readily available food hereabouts which still contains the complete natural range of the 72 nutritional elements, a daily helping of seafood is your most powerful and most effective weapon against cancer. For further confirmation see "THE OKINAWA DIET" in these pages - the typical diet of the longest living and healthiest people on this Earth.


Friday, September 3, 2010

Why I Am Vegan ~ Walter Bond Political Prisoner

Why Am I Vegan

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By Walter Bond
In the winter of 1995, when I was 19 years old, I got a job with a company by the name of Dakota Mechanical. We built slaughter-houses in the Midwest, mainly in Iowa. The state of Iowa is the largest producer of pork in the nation. At the time I was employed in that evil industry there were 27 slaughter-houses for pigs alone. I helped build the IBP plant in Logansport, Indiana as well. It was a brand new plant.
I never saw an animal murdered in the 9 or so months I worked in Logansport, but it wasn’t difficult for me to get the gist of what many of those machines would do when in operation. I was primarily a forklift operator to begin with, but then worked my way to industrial plumber’s apprentice. After that factory was built there was a three month layoff.

But soon I got the call for the next job. The one that would forever change my life. It was a smaller job; we were to build an extension to the kill floor at the IBP plant in Perry, Iowa. In this fully functioning slaughter-house I saw the most grizzly mechanized murders that there are to witness. Since it was an old facility we were constantly called away from our construction work to do maintenance throughout the plant. From the pen runs, to the kill floor, to rendering, over the course of 5 months I was a confederate and accomplice to it all.

When I first started the smells, sights, and sounds were overbearing. I kept telling myself, “This is what you eat; don’t get squeamish.” Within 6 to 8 weeks I felt soul dead. For 12 hours, sometimes 15, I often worked ankle deep in gore.
Like the 3 days I worked plumbing rinse stations with 40 gallon drums of de-skinned hogs’ heads staring at me.

Or the times I would have to take the forklift behind the facility to gather raw materials, right next to which was a 25 foot pile of ‘defective’ hogs which were ‘unfit for human consumption.’ For one reason or another they were left in heaping piles, exposed to the elements and freezing to death in the Iowa cold. With all the horrors to which I was privy, it’s that pile of freezing dead that still haunts my soul.
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Then came the day that changed me. We were wrapping up all our tools and cleaning up when a hog who had been knocked out with an electric jolt, had his throat stuck, and had been hung upside down to bleed to death woke up, convulsed, and freed himself of the foot-hold. He came running off of the kill floor straight toward me and the rest of the crew. Three IBP workers gave chase. One with a pipe wrench and two with baseball bats. They began to beat the hog to death. I turned away as I thought anyone would……I was wrong. As I turned, I was face to face with the rest of my crew. While listening to the thuds and squeals of a blunt force death a mere 30 feet behind me, I watched as my co-workers whooped and cheered, high-fiving each other each time there was a thud, laughing and celebrating the violent death of a sentient being.

That night in my hotel room my mind raced. I was disgusted with myself. I was disgusted with humanity. I quit eating meat. A few days later my foreman approached me and asked if I need to borrow any money. I said, “No, why do you ask?” He said that he’d noticed that all I’d been eating was peanut butter and jelly and that he thought I was broke. I told him that I wasn’t broke and that I was simply done eating meat. He began heckling me and calling me a “born-again tree hugger.” I quit on the spot.

I went home and began to study Animal Rights. I went vegan and became active in a legal capacity. I spent years tabling and talking with people. I worked at animal sanctuaries and rescued animals whenever I could.
I have never felt that anything I have done or will do on behalf of our Mother Earth and her animal nations has been enough. Those machines I built back in 1996 are still murdering, even as I write this. That is my guilt and my shame; I earned them. But it is also my strength and resolve. Nothing will ever make me forget the plight of factory farmed animals and so-called free range, which is just as sick, wrong, unnecessary, and indefensible.

Like all industries of animal exploitation, the circle of abuse will end with the antagonist (humans) falling prey to its own perfidiousness. For instance, my grandfather was a hog farmer whom I never met. He died in the year of my birth, after the ammonia from hog waste destroyed his lungs. That same waste run-off from his and adjoining hog farms in the 70’s poisoned the ground water, allowing illegal levels of radium to pollute the tap water. To this day in certain areas of the Midwest you have to sign a waiver stating that the water from public works is hazardous to your health and that you are “OK” with that before they will turn your water on.
I’ve said it before, but it’s worth restating. It is these industries of death that are the animal and Earth terrorists. Not those who fight against them.
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Political Prisoner Walter Bond
 
Write Bond letters of prisoner support at:
Walter Bond  # P01051760
PO Box 16700
Golden, CO 80402-6700
As of August 10, 2010, Walter Bond is facing a single federal arson charge for his alleged role as an ALF operative known as “Lone Wolf”. “Lone Wolf” took credit for three different arsons throughout the Spring and Summer of 2010 in Denver and Salt Lake City: The Skeepskin Factory, a store selling furs and pelts; Tandy Leather Store; and Tiburon, a restaurant serving foie gras.
Walter’s brother alerted the FBI and the ATF about his suspicions that his brother, Walter, was behind the attacks. While Walter was visiting Denver in July 2010, his brother helped participate in a sting operation, allegedly wearing a wire and helping procure audio evidence against Walter. He was arrested in Denver and is now being held in the Jefferson County Jail in Golden, Colorado awaiting trial.
Walter has been a dedicated animal rights activist and anarchist for several decades and has struggled for animal liberation and against a deadly and genocidal culture of drug abuse in the United States. Walter was the subject of a song by the vegan straight edge band Earth Crisis. The band’s song “To Ashes” was inspired by Bond’s 1998 prison sentence for arson. Bond was convicted of burning down a meth lab owned by a drug dealer who was selling to his brother (not the same brother as the snitch).
If the nonhumans could fight back, their tormentors would have expired long ago. We have an obligation to expose the abusers. It is the LEAST we can do! I welcome your emails & contributions.
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