News Archive - Page 131 of 144

Femke, a broken-hearted mother

Femke, a broken-hearted mother
27.04.2017
Oise Femke, a broken-hearted mother
Exploitation for shows

The tragedy continues in the dolphinarium… One Voice is sounding the alarm for Femke, broken by the industry who tore her away from her family and the ocean, and then took her son, Ekinox.

She could behave like other typical captive cetaceans: she could gnaw against the concrete pool sides, throw herself against the walls and attack other captive dolphins… But Femke, born free and captured off the Florida coast, is not there yet. After almost 40 years of captivity, she is totally adrift and seems to be dying of sadness. When she was filmed
last October, Femke stayed away from the other dolphins and had stopped participating in the presentations. She was fading away, isolated in her despair after her only reason to survive in these tiny, sad pools was torn away from her.

Arriving in Park Asterix in 2008, Femke gave birth to Ekinox, her only son – a blessed moment in her long life in captivity. She also survived a normally fatal serious illness. Today, she is unable to swim normally because of her poor deformed and scarred body.

In 2016, her child, who was still very young, was taken away from her to stock the Attica Park pools, a Greek zoo which is a member of the marine circuses network organised throughout Europe. Ekinox, released with the other males, who have also been separated at a young age from their mothers, will probably waste away there. But in the name of genetics, transfers must be encouraged…. So families are torn apart, individuals are crushed.

As for Femke, she seems to have given up already. The images filmed at the beginning of the “season” are distressing. What sort of a show has a limp dolphin present, meandering lethargically in its bowl whilst the others perform!

“Femke’s mental and physical state is extremely worrying and requires urgent specialist veterinary expertise”, attests our veterinary consultant, Pierre Gallego, who observed her at length on the 19th of April. One Voice has referred this request to the prefect and doesn’t count on just doing that whilst Femke’s state deteriorates.

This tragedy affects all dolphinariums. Share the story of Femke and
Ekinox on your networks and sign our petition! Let’s stop this suffering…

The horror of fur farms in Europe!

The horror of fur farms in Europe!
26.04.2017
The horror of fur farms in Europe!
Fashion

The Czech organisation Animal Defenders, One Voice’s partner in the global coalition Fur Free Alliance, has launched a campaign following the release of two staggering videos on the 27th of March.

The European fur industry’s official line regarding the care lavished on these animals is now severely discredited. An incredible film investigation has been led by Animal Defenders and its president Marek Vorsilka, resulting in
two videos. The first one documents the killing of a silver fox: roughly dragged out of its hutch, then hung by its paws and subjected to a sordid and mismanaged anal electrocution. The screams and the desperate movements of the animal during the whole procedure, as well as the executioner’s indifference, make us shudder. A lack of respect for animal life is well recompensed in the fur industry…

The second film produced by
Animal Defenders sends a shiver up the spine. In this film the camera shows how minks transported in barred cages are shoved into a kind of wooden trailer towed by a mini-tractor. Pipes linking the tractor to the trailer can be clearly seen, which will serve to suffocate the ten minks who are locked inside this teenager driven ‘tourist train’ with the tractor exhaust fumes. This vile gas chamber method is unworthy of the 21
^st Century…

According to industry published figures on this EU member country, ten farms exported 20,000 mink and fox skins for a turnover of 5 million euros in 2015. In a few weeks, the Czech parliament will announce whether it is for or against the banning of such practices on its soil, a vote desired by 70% of Czechs. However, the vote risks being unfavourable because of the ANO, a young party led by a liberal Europhobe and magnate entrepreneur, Andrej Babiš. Animal Defenders has launched a
petition. One Voice fully supports this appeal and asks you to please like and share these informative videos. From Prague to Paris, cruelty is still cruelty, a lie is still a lie… Enough!

Through my eyes

Through my eyes
24.04.2017
Through my eyes
Animal testing

One Voice invites you to discover animal experimentation through the eyes of animals. These are the dogs, the monkeys, the rabbits who are sacrificed every day in the French laboratories.

« They came and pulled me out of my cage. I was firmly held and something long and thin was inserted into my mouth. I did not like that. I got angry when they put it deeper down my throat. It was not food. I felt it slipping down inside me. I was suffocating. I understood that it was not normal. Every day, for months, it started again. They took me out of my cage and forcefully inserted this tube in the back of my
throat where they leaked something. What they put in my belly started to make me feel sick. After that, I did not always want to eat what
was brought to me. When I did eat, I sometimes threw up everything. After several months, I was out of my cage one last time. They held me firmly and shaved my leg. I then felt something sharp sink into it. A feeling of cold suddenly swept over me when a liquid was spilled into my veins. I suddenly felt very tired. I remembered the smell of my mother. I would have liked to have been with her again. »

Support our fight to see an end to these experiments on our companions !

« I screamed in panic when they brutally strapped me to a restraining device, but no one came to help me. My head was firmly maintained. A device was implanted into my skull, which was hurting me so much, it was the pulled up and fixed on a bar above me. I could not move. On a big screen in front of me, sets of patterns began to appear. For months I endured this trauma, I learned that when this pattern was
repeated, I had to quickly press a button in front of me. I was then rewarded with a little fruit juice delivered drop by drop into my mouth. I wanted this juice. I had not had any liquid for several hours and I was very, very thirsty. After several hours, I was released from this device and put back into a cage. I did not fight this time. I wanted to sleep. I wanted to forget. »

Support our fight towards the end of primate experiments !

« I curled up in the cage when a hand tried to catch me. Stronger than me, she manages to grab me. I was then locked in a box from where only my head was sticking out. I could not move. I looked around and saw rows of my companions locked up in the same way. Then a man
walked towards me. I began to breathe faster. I struggled to escape, without success. The man lifted one of my eyelids and instilled something in my eye. Everything has become vague. The substance burned as my vision began to disappear. I saw almost nothing and the burning sensation persisted.

I wanted that to stop. I wanted to remove this stuff but I could not. It was so bad. I was struggling, I could not scratch my eye. Finally, the man came back. After examining my eye, he put me back in my empty, cold cage. I was alone, scared, and in pain. I hoped he would not come back. »

Support our fight for the end of animal experimentation !

One Voice is the French representative of ECEAE, the European Coalition to End Animal Experimentation.

Presidential elections 2017: answers from the candidates about the animal cause

Presidential elections 2017: answers from the candidates about the animal cause
20.04.2017
Presidential elections 2017: answers from the candidates about the animal cause
Other campaign or multi-campaigns of One Voice

One Voice wrote to presidential candidates to ask them to position themselves on the priority animal issues. Here are the answers we received.

The themes on which all the candidates were solicited by One Voice are circuses, dolphinariums, mink breeding (for fur) and angora rabbits, wolves, animal experimentation and stray cats.

Only 4 responses were received. They come from Nathalie Arthaud, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron.

Stop mink farming in France!

Stop mink farming in France!
13.04.2017
Stop mink farming in France!
Fashion

Two mink farms in Franche-Comté call for an increase in the size of their capacity. Even more suffering? One Voice is against it. Let’s mobilize together, quickly!

In the case of the first breeder, revealing serious infractions is worth describing.

The company opened at Emagny in 1985. From the beginning, it broke all regulations, moved into a protected natural area, feeding its mink with the skinned corpses of their predecessors pours its dirty water directly into the river Ognon. Warnings of abuse, recommendations, procedures and seals, its manager is finally sentenced in 2016 to imprisonment. But what is this benevolence shown by local authorities? Thus, the Prefecture had to be called to order, for the lack of binding measures against the breeder a repeat offender. The municipality, meanwhile, has revised its land use with plans to reclassify the agricultural area, the plot illegally occupied by the farmer and allow him to stay there.

Here the breeder, just out of court with a monitoring bracelet on his ankle, asks the regularization and extension of his breeding, with construction of 10 additional buildings. The total capacity of his farm would increase to 18,200 mink including 3,200 for breeding. The public inquiry runs until May 20, 2017 and everyone can file a comment. A second breeder located in Montarlot-lez-Rioz, probably linked to the first one, wants to pass to 5,000 mink.

Why do mink farms need to be banned?

Firstly, because they make animals suffer. Mink are semi-aquatic mammals, forced to live from birth in tiny mesh cages without access to water. All of them eventually go crazy and most end up like at Emagny, gassed in groups of a hundred in an airtight box connected to the exhaust of a heat engine: so as to not soil the fur with blood.

Then, because the farms pollute terribly. The excrement of mink, their blood and their carcasses generate a real environmental risk. These nitrogen and phosphorus-laden wastes pollute water by runoff and lead to eutrophication of rivers, which is fatal for fish. Large quantities of ammonia gas, nitrogen oxide and methane are also released into the air, affecting the quality of life of the surrounding inhabitants and contributing to global warming.

Finally, with captive animals constantly escaping, American mink reared in these farms quickly adapt to our biotopes and their invasive presence affects local wildlife, especially mink in Europe. They end up cruelly trapped or drowned as harmful pests.

For all mink, please signify your refusal on the extension of the breeding centre of Emagny, please leave your comments on the site of the services for the department in the Doubs, from April 18th to May 20th, 2017.

http://www.doubs.gouv.fr/Politiques-publiques/Amenagement-du-territoire-Construction-Logement-et-Transports/Amenagement-et-developpement-durables/Enquetes-publiques/Enquetes-ICPE/Formulez-vos- comments-Breeding-of-aim-a-Emagny

Experiments on Mice, distorted results!

Experiments on Mice, distorted results!
28.03.2017
Experiments on Mice, distorted results!
Animal testing

A new study demonstrates the lack of credibility from results based on the animal model. Where and when the manipulation of conditions influences the results…

Published on March 21st in a very serious revue in the magazine Nature, the work of two biologists from the University of Liverpool, Dr. Gouveia and Dr. Pre Hurst. Their work supports what One Voice and its partners in the European Coalition having been saying to end animal experimentation. One Voice and the European Coalition continue to denounce animal experimentation and the scientific validity of work done on animals.

Both researchers show that the stress triggered in mice by one of the most common gestures of laboratory workers, namely to move test animals by holding them by the tail. This “significantly alters their anxiety, which has a major impact on the reliability of their response to stimuli in behavioural tests”.

Most animal experiments, invasive or not, involve the manipulation of rodents (more than 1 million each year in France), and mice are the most used in behavioural research work on memory, learning, how drugs and other substances affect their brains and cognitive abilities.

If the stress caused by the most basic manipulation is a factor distorting the results, what about all the captive conditions and the tests imposed on all of the victims during an experiment?

In funding these studies, the NC3R (National Research Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Laboratory Animals, the English equivalent of ECVAM at the European level) concludes that other methods need to be used. Manipulation, such as “orientation tunnels”. Dr. Mark Prescott mentions for this organization: “This study provides additional evidence, this time scientific, about the need to abandon manipulations by the tails of mice in the laboratory”. The organization has also declared the year 2017 as the “well-being of laboratory rodents”!

According to One Voice, this is above all a new proof that the animal model, more in principle than in its modalities, is not adapted for a modern science supposed to produce results transposable to the human. Rather than manipulate mice differently, like other animal victims, let’s stop using animals under these maximum stress conditions by holding them in laboratories!

A new trial for Jo, the young calf abused at a slaughterhouse in Vannes

A new trial for Jo, the young calf abused at a slaughterhouse in Vannes
27.03.2017
A new trial for Jo, the young calf abused at a slaughterhouse in Vannes

The endless agony of a young calf in the courtyard of a slaughterhouse in Vannes will be the subject of an appeal on April 3, 2017 at 10:30 in Rennes. Once again, One Voice will be a civil party to defend Jo’s memory and advocate for the respect of an animal person.

The case that moved the whole of France: Saturday October 1 2016, a calf is delivered to the slaughterhouse in the trading estate area of Prat, where it falls from a ramp when it is pushed out of the truck. It tears the ligaments of its hind legs and breaks its pelvis when hitting the ground. Left alone all weekend, the animal remains liying on the concrete floor in the rain and the cold, with nothing to drink. His suffering is atrocious. But, it’s only on Monday that the SPA (Society for the Protection of Animals) Vannes had been given warning of this, and that on Sunday morning the young bull – which we named Jo – had finally been put down.

Immediately, One Voice and the SPA of Vannes filed a complaint against the slaughterhouse, as well as four other associations. At the end of a first trial, SARL Sélection Viande Distribution was found guilty of three offenses. A 600 euros fine was claimed for « deprivation of food or watering of a domestic animal by its keeper, breeder or animal keeper », 800 euros for « deprivation of care » and 800 euros still for « ill treatment to a domestic animal « . A ridiculous price for the suffering of Jo …

From the judgment rendered by the law court, the Sarl Société Viande Distribution appealed the sentence pronounced against them. There is now a second trial that will open on April 3 to defend the memory of Jo.

As a plaintiff, One Voice is hoping to obtain even more severe fines than in the first instance, so that this judgment is a landmark
decision and that, never again, shall a young calf with a broken leg does not agonize alone on a cold concrete floor of a deserted slaughterhouse.

Remember that 4.7 million calves and large cattle die in more than 260 slaughterhouses each year in France. That’s one animal every 7 seconds… And very often in unworthy conditions.

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The name of the world is forest*

The name of the world is forest*
21.03.2017
The name of the world is forest*
Natural habitat

The destruction of the primary forests is causing a worsening change of the climate. With them die rare species and subtle cultures, human or non-human, of which we will never know anything about.

The saw cuts the bark of a gigantic dipterocarp. Up above, an orang-utan mother and her baby cling to the last branches of the canopy, as if to flee to the sky. But the tree is cut in all its width. Slowly, majestically, inexorably, its trunk, all eighty meters of it, wobbles, bends and collapses in a thunder of broken wood, torn vines, hoarse cries, and frightful flights of hornbills. In falling, the giant carries in death a thousand nests, a thousand lives, a thousand small dens hidden in the folds of its bark. He crushes a thousand others under his enormous mass. He himself is a living being, conscious of what surrounds him in the manner of plants. And while we pick up the little red monkey from the broken body of his mother, the reclining tree loses its sap like blood. It is soon dragged along the mud tracks, raked by trucks in the bosom of its world: the rainforest of Sumatra.

Everywhere, this scene is repeated. In the Congo Basin or the Amazon, in Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, Canada, everywhere, forests are disappearing under the steamroller of human madness. Monstrous dams are engulfing them, sprawling cities are devouring them little by little, and cattle farms are finishing them off. Giant trees are cut down for the precious wood industry. Fires are lit to make room for palm oil plantations. Coltan mines excavate the earth to the last roots in the heart of Congolese national parks. Their workers eat bushmeat and kill the gorillas.

No account is ever held of the inhabitants of this ocean of trees that are ravaged. Tropical forests are yet home to the world’s most marvellous biodiversity, tree frogs, unheard-of insects, unknown medicinal plants and subtle non-human cultures. The forest is also home to human peoples who have been exploiting its resources with respect for a millennium. In symbiosis with her, they venerate and protect her. But the magic of their shamans can do nothing against gold diggers armed to the teeth, bulldozers and soldiers who expel them from their ancestral lands and destroy their traditions.

Each year, more than 13 million hectares of forest are lost, the equivalent of the surface of England or forty football fields every minute. This biotope is essential for climate stability and soil conservation. Its destruction further increases the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and with it, climate change and flooding, droughts and landslides.

In the past, we lived with the forest. She surrounded our hamlets until the end of the Middle Ages. Huge expanses of oaks then covered the whole of France. The bears, the wolves, the lynx prospered in peace, regulating in harmony the nature around them. Today, everything has
been totally ravaged or almost. Fields, highways, cities, car parks stretching to infinity have long covered the high forests and woods, which occupy only a small area of the European continent. We have forgotten the majesty of trees; we have lost the secret of dialogue with them. And today already we are starting to pay dearly. Forests are a treasure of evolution: help us to protect them!

* Title of a beautiful novel by Ursula Le Guin

Crime in the Réunion: Cat hunting is in open season

Crime in the Réunion: Cat hunting is in open season
24.02.2017
Crime in the Réunion: Cat hunting is in open season
Domestic animals

A cruel and indiscriminate hunt against cats has been opened by the Prefect of the Réunion on the pretext of protecting two endemic bird species. One Voice intervenes…

On 23 February, One Voice filed an interim appeal to suspend a recent order from the Prefect of the Réunion, which allows the controlling
of stray cat populations near the nesting sites of the Barau Petrel and Bourbon Black Petrel seabirds. These endemic species of highly endangered seabirds have been the subject of successive and legitimate conservation plans since 2008. The occasional predation of birds by hungry cats is one of the possible threats identified by these plans (among ‘others, like that of rats, which cats chase …), the Prefect implements massive, totally illegal measures, which are the lethal capture and trapping of all stray cats over large areas of the National Park of the Réunion, for a period of 2 years.

State deficiencies in the management of feline strays, despite the record of euthanasia on the island (15,000 cats per year), is being carried out underhandly using the risk of extinction of Petrels. Already victims of abandonment or loss of their homes for first-generation cats, here now these cats are the target of illegal trapping, using different techniques: cages-traps, « Steve Allan Conibear-kill trap » and « Timms » devices. Kill traps or poisoned bait.

All of these attacks on the lives of domestic animals are prohibited, they seem not concerned by the regulations about animals liable to cause damage (formerly known as «harmful») or affected by rabies.

While other means could be used, deadly traps and poisonings are deployed without knowing which cats (or other animals) will be victims, for lack of prior identification. Activated traps are supposed to be removed within 24 hours … in remote areas around the cirque of Cilaos (Piton des Neiges, Grand Bénare, Dimitile). A day at least of torture for each cat trapped under the blinding hot sun. We are anticipating the court date…

Reunion Island: Saint-André Shark Accident

Reunion Island: Saint-André Shark Accident
21.02.2017
Reunion Island: Saint-André Shark Accident
Wildlife

A young man has just lost his life in Saint-André in a new accident.

We would like to give to the family and friends of this young man our utmost sincere condolences.

We urge the « users of the ocean » to respect the bans on swimming and surfing in the areas deemed dangerous and to the Prefect who was so quick to spend millions on irresponsible fishing to enforce his own orders.

This accident comes in full consultation on fishing in the Marine Reserve.

Remember that there is no Marine Reserve in Saint-André, but it only takes a few hours for a shark to move from the West Coast to the East Coast as the CHARC program has demonstrated.

A bait belt was installed in front of the west coast and this bait belt extended to Sainte-Marie. Reunion sharks, which are quietly around the island, have been set on Réunion.

The observations of off-season sharks have never been more numerous than since the senseless baiting of the shark cap experiment has been extended. Today there is a new fatal accident.

We will react further in another release.

Association Collective: Aspas, Brigitte Bardot Foundation, Longitude 181, One Voice, Shark Integration, Shark Conservation, Sea shepherd, Tendua, Waves.

A bait belt was installed in front of the west coast and this bait belt was extended to Sainte-Marie. In this way, the Reunion has been fixed as a passing point for sharks that are quietly circling around the island.

The observations of off-season sharks have never been more numerous than since this senseless baiting experiment for sharks off the headland which had been extended.

Today there has been a new fatality.

We will be reacting further in another release.

Association Collective: Aspas, Brigitte Bardot Foundation, Longitude 181, One Voice, Shark Integration, Shark Conservation, Sea shepherd, Tendua, Waves.

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