Indonesia & their sick selves

 Ugh.. when it comes to reptiles, I am extra sensitive. I have had many as pets, I wouldn't ever have them again because I see now it is cruel to cage these exotic creatures and try to copy their necessities. But anyway, let's talk about snakes first.. they've been around since the dinosaurs. Most that live near humans are harmless and the encounters are rare because of  their keen ability to detect vibrations using their jaws and bellies. Their forked tongues are like built-in-radars to help them aware of their surroundings. Most live underground or under rocks, come in in trees and slid around eating insects and small critters. Many lay eggs that are incubated by the sun and some carry their eggs in their bodies and give birth to fully developed young. Here's the sick stuff: to kill snakes for their skins, hunters invade their homes and nail them to trees and skin them alive before tossing them into a pile to die. They often suffer for days before succumbing to shock or dehydration. Lovely!
 Lizards are absolutely amazing and unique! Most can shed their tails to evade predators and run on four legs, twisting their bodies side to side. Some run on their back legs and EVEN run on water, what is known as Jesus Christ running, lol. Some can change colors to match their surroundings. Iguanas have a 3rd eye on top of their heads to regulate hormone production related to time basking. Some can even squirt blood from their eyes be deliberately increasing the blood pressure in their heads. Unfortunately instead of living up to 33 years in the wild, lizards are murdered for their skins, usually first clubbed on their heads or have their spines severed with chisels as soon as they are to a certain size.. great, huh?
 Lastly, lets talk about alligators and crocodiles.. the most noticeable difference between the two are their teeth. Alligators have a large fourth tooth in their lower jaw that fits inside their upper jaw when they close their mouths. With crocodiles, these teeth are visible even when their mouths are closed. Alligators can be found in rivers, reservoirs, tidal marshes, swamps, rivers, ponds, lakes, and canals. Humans, beavers, and they are one of the few species who create wetland habitat. Alligators use their snouts, forefeet, and tails to burrow holes that fill with water and can be the size of a backyard swimming pool! To survive subfreezing temperatures, they move to shallow water, stick their nostrils above the surface, and let their snouts become frozen into the ice. Mother crocodiles and alligators are very motherly. They are protective and their young normally stay with them in a "pod" for one to three years. Alligators communicate through distress yelps, bellowing, hissing, coughing, hatching sounds, and vocalizations that are not audible to humans and can travel very long distances. Alligators are often kept in filthy, crowded tanks on alligator "farms" before being clubbed and skinned alive.

DOWN Industry

    So, this was news to me. My boyfriend and I went shopping for pillows a couple weeks ago and he mentioned something about down feathers. I had no idea what he was talking about and he explained to me that some pillows had real goose feathers in them! I suppose I have lived a sheltered life.. but I never heard of such a thing. I just thought they all had fake feathers inside of them.. but to my surprise, I did some research and found out about the grim down industry. They often pluck their geese alive in order to get their "down," which is the soft layer of feathers closest to the bird's skin. These feathers are used for clothing and comforters.
    There has been a lot of undercover video footage showing employees on goose farms pulling fistfuls of feathers out of live birds, causing the birds to shriek while making bloody wounds in their skin. They are squeezed upside down between workers' knees during the painful procedure - in one instance, an investigator photographed a worker who was sitting on a goose's neck in order to prevent her from escaping.............
    Plucking live birds causes incredible distress and pain. Once the feathers are ripped out, the birds are paralyzed with fear and left with gaping wounds. I say the lucky ones die as a result of the procedure. If they survive, the birds wounds are sewn up with needle and thread without aenestetics and go through the process again once their feathers grow back in.
    That's not all.. buying down supports the cruelty of foie gras and meat industries because many farmers who raise birds for food make an extra profit by selling their feathers as well. When they're slaughtered, aoften their throats are cut or dumped into tanks of scalding hot water while their still conscious. Can you imagine? Gives me chills..
    The only way to be sure that the products you buy was not obtained from live-plucked birds is to choose cruelty-free materials. My pillows are comfy as ever! Please make the compassionate decision to be down-free and not support the abuse of birds.

Did you know an oyster's pearl is the same as a human's ulcer?

    I learned something new today - another sad unnecessary inhumane fact today.. the scoop on pearls. So, what is a pearl? It is an ulcer that is formed when irritant, such as a parasite, enters an oyster, who responds by coating it with nacre, which is a crystalline substance that gives pearls their lister. An oyster makes this coating when stressed - just as we gets ulcers when we are stressed.
    Because pearls naturally only form in only 1 in 10,000 oysters and the creation of the pearl can take up to three years, pearl makers have devised a process called culturing that allows them to exploit oysters cheaper and faster. Of course they have.. Culturing involves surgically opening each oyster shell and inserting an irritant inside the oyster. Freshwater pearls are cultured by inserting another oyster' mantle tissue. Saltwater pearls have beads and another oyster's mollusk tissue inserted. Less than half survive this unnatural process.
    Culticators further stress them by suspending them in water in a cage, washing their shells, moving them around in different, unknown water, and raising and lowering their cages to subject them to changing water temperatures. After the pearls are extracted from the oysters, one third of the animals are "recycled" and put through the process again, which the rest are killed and thrown away. And, for those concerned with the environment, there is another reason to avoid pearls. Aquaculture has contributed to destruction of natural pearl oyster beds from pollution and over harvesting. With so many imitations of pearls, it is EASY to do without pearls.. effortless actually.

Would you like your skin turned into a handbag?

    Most leather comes from cows raised from both milk & beef. Cows raised for beef spend most of their entire lives on extremely crowded feedlots. Ranchers maximize profits by giving each steer less than 20 square feet of living space - the equivalent of putting twelve half-ton steers in a typical American bedroom. I cannot even fathom that - I wouldn't be happy living in an American bedroom myself.
    These earthlings are subjected to painful procedures such as branding (which causes 3rd degree burns), castration, de-horning, and talk-docking - all without painkillers. They are deprived of veterinary care and exposed to the elements without any shelter. These feeling, thinking, breathing animals who feel pain just as much as you and I do, suffer immensely. They are also fed a steady diet of hormones to fatten them up & antibiotics to keep them alive in these cruel deathly environments. At the end of their short (but what feels like an eternity to them), dismal lives, they are jam-packed into metal trucks, where they suffer from injury, hunger and thirst. They are confused and terrified in crowded conditions and even during weather extremes. In the winter, cows arrive for slaughter frozen to the sides of transport trucks, frozen to truck bottoms in their own feces and urine, and are injured or dead from the journey. Frequently collapsing during their hellish ride, many arrive to the slaughterhouse unable to walk out of the back of the transport truck, so they are dragged off with chains, often breaking bones when they hot the ground.
    Every year, tens of millions of cows are stunned, hung upside-down, bled to death, and skinned in 'murderhouses.' The federal Humane Slaughter Act stipulates that cows should be stunned by a mechanical blow to the head and rendered unconscious before they are strung up, but the high speed of the assembly lines - which often process up to 400 cows per hour - often results in improper stunning. Each year, millions are skinned and dismembered while kicking and crying out in terror.
    Buying leather DIRECTLY contributes to factory farms and slaughterhouses because the skin is the most economically important byproduct of the meat industry. There are PLENTY of non-leather, non-cruel products out there to choose from, including cotton, canvas, linen, rubber, ramie, and synthetics!

SAY NO TO WOOL - Compassion is the Fashion

    Because there is a market for the fleece and skins of sheep, these gentle animals who feel pain, fear, and loneliness are treated as nothing more than wool-producing machines. If they were left alone and not genetically manipulated, they would grow just enough wool to protect themselves from extreme temperatures. The fleece provides effective insulation against both cold and heat.
    Shearers are usually paid by volume, not by the hour, which encourages fast work without regard for the welfare of the sheep. One eyewitness says, "[T]he shearing shed must be one of the worst places in the world for cruelty to animals.. I have seen shearers punch sheep with their shears or their fists until the sheep's nose bled. I have seen sheep with half their faces shorn off.."
    In Australia, where more than fifty percent of the world's merino wool - which is used in products ranging from clothing to carpets - originates, lambs are forced to endure a gruesome procedure called mulesing. Mulesing is when large chunks of skin and flesh are cut from the animals'' backsides, usually with no painkillers.
    Within just weeks of birth, lambs' ears are hole-punched, their tails are chopped off, and the males are castrated without anesthetics. Male lambs are castrated when they are between two to eight WEEKS old, either by making an incision and cutting their testicles out ot with a rubber ring used to cut off blood supply - one of the most painful methods of castration possible! Each and every year, hundred of lambs die before the age of eight weeks from exposure or starvation, and mature sheep die every year from disease, lack of shelter, and neglect.
    Millions of these sheep are who survive on the farms are shipped to the Middle East on crowded multilevel ships. These live exports, which can last for weeks go to countries where animal welfare standards are non-existent. These tortured sheep are dragged off the ships, loaded onto trucks, and dragged by their ears and legs to often regulated slaughterhouses, where their throats are slit while they are still conscious.
    No amount of fluff can hide the fact that anyone who buys wool supports a cruel and bloody industry. There are plenty of durable, stylish, and warm fabrics available that aren't made from wool or any animal skins. Please join me and the millions of people all over the world who know that compassion is the fashion. Save a sheep - don't buy wool.

~FUR~

Whether it came from an animal on a fur farm or one who was trapped in the wild, every fur coat, trinket, and bit of trim caused an animal tremendous suffering and took away a life. Animals on fur farms spend their lives confined to cramped, filthy wire cages. Fur farmers use the cheapest and cruelest killing methods available, including suffocation, electrocution, gas, and poison.
    More than half of the U.S. fur comes in from China.. millions of dogs & cats are bludgeoned, hanged, bled to death, and often skinned ALIVE for their fur. Chinese fur is often deliberately mislabeled, so if you wear ANY fur, there's no way of knowing for sure whose skin you're in.
    Trapped animals in the wild can suffer for days from blood loss, shock, dehydration, frostbite, gangrene, and attacks by predators. They may be caught in steel-jaw traps that slam down on their legs, often cutting to the bone, or conibear traps, which crush their necks with ninety pounds of pressure per square inch.. or how about water-set traps? They leave bears, muskrats, and other animals struggling got more than nine minutes before drowning.
    During the annual Canadian seal slaughter, tens of thousands of baby harp seals are shot and repeatedly bludgeoned with clubs tipped with metal hooks, as I recently posted. Also in Canada, hundreds of black bears are shot at point-blank range or caught in traps and left to suffer for days so that their skins can be used to make the ceremonial hats worn by Queen Elizabeth II's Five Guards' Regiments.
    But, don't worry - there are plenty of cruel free fabrics and even faux furs that are available in stores everywhere. Groups like PETA continue to work with designers and clothing retailers to encourage them to use and sell only animal-friendly products.

 

 

Baby Harp Seal Murders

    Every year the Canadian government allows hunters to bludgeon to death hundreds of thousands of baby harp seals. During the slaughter, they are shot or repeatedly clubbed. Sealers bludgeon the animals with clubs and hakapiks (which are metal hook tipped clubs) and drag the usually still conscious seals across the ice floes with boat hooks. Hunters toss dead and dying seals into heaps and leave the carcasses to rot on ice floes because there is no market for seal meat. Veterinarians have found while investigating this horror that hunters routinely fail to comply with Canada's animal welfare standards.
    Baby seals are helpless and have no way to escape the clubs. A Washington Post article on the seal slaughter described it this way: "[A] seal appearing to gasp for air, blood running from its nose as it lies on an ice floe. Not far away, a sealer sharpens his knife blade. The seal seems to be thrashing as it's fur is sliced from it's torso." I literally just quivered as I typed the quote. Can you imagine the terror and pain? I can't. I get a hangnail and get all upset.. I smash my finger in a drawer, I'm crying.. but but beat, hooked, skinned alive and slaughtered.........
    The Christian Science Monitor wrote: "The few terrified survivors, left to crawl through the carnage. The shouted obscenities and threats from the sealers, gunfire cracking ominously in the distance. The pitiful cries of the pups; the repellent thuds of clubs raining down on soft skulls. Sealers' laughter echoing across the in floes." Many seals who are killed are 3 months old or younger and haven't learned how to swim or eaten their first solid meal.
    The sealing industry says that they're killing more seals because of an increased demand for fur. Although the U.S. banned the sale of seal fur in 1972, anyone wearing the for of minks, rabbits, foxes, or any other kind of animal is responsible for creating a demand for fur, which pushes Canadian hunters to club more seals each year. Then in 2009, the European Union voted to end the sale of seal products, and the U.S. Senate unanimously passed U.S. Senate Resolution 84, calling for an immediate end to the annual seal slaughter.
    Oh man, it would be fabulous is everyone who reals this contacts the Canadian government and ask for an immediate end to this cruel slaughter. Thank you.