7 Links

I wanted to share some links I've come across this week relating to animal issues, the environment and veganism...

Tiger nearly killed in making of Life of Pi

1. A couple of days a go this article came up on my dash:

Animals Were Harmed: Hollywood's Nightmare of Death, Injury and Secretary Exposed, a detailed article in the Hollywood Reporter that reveals how many animals have been negligibly injured and killed during the filming of Hollywood films such as Life of Pi, The Hobbit, HOB's Luck and many more.

I naively thought that nowadays there would be strict regulations in place to protect the well being of animals used in movies and that filmmakers would be forbidden from deliberately killing or harming animals for live action shots - but instead we have another corrupt system to add to our long list. Since reading Thanking the Monkey years ago I have opposed the use of wild animals for entertainment and films because wild animals have to be 'trained' to perform and do as they are told and this usually involves negative reinforcement such as hitting, prodding and beating.

And of course wild animals are just that, wild animals and cannot really ever be controlled. If they want to lash out at someone, they will.

This brings me to my second link...

2. Trainer Mauled by Tiger at Australia Zoo

The stupidity of the human race and the media never fails to amaze me. I think the outcome speaks for itself here. But I will say this - training tigers to interact with people and to perform tricks is not conservation.

3. Al Gore Goes Vegan

While I am a little skeptical about this one particularly since it also talks about Bill Clinton as being vegan when apparently he is not really vegan - though I believe he may have been vegan initially while he was trying to improve his health and now consumes much less meat and animal products than he used too. The article also says Gore reportedly switched to veganism for health reasons. While it would be great if this were true, even going mostly vegan or cutting down your meat/dairy intake is a good start so good on him. I do hope that environmentalists will take note of this too because there are a lot of environmental benefits to eating a plant based diet - mainly because livestock produce so much methane, factory farms and fish farms produce toxic run off and meat production uses huge amounts of water.

4. Two guardian articles about waste:

 Marine plastic pollution: the threat pervading Australia's waters

Ever since I watched Midway I have been deeply concerned about the amount of plastic waste ending up in our oceans. We really need to do something now. We need to stop over consuming and start cleaning up after ourselves - stop dropping cigarette butts all over the ground and being litter bugs - because sea animals and birds pay the price for our pollution - and we will to eventually if our ocean ecosystems die.

5. And the second article is more about priorities - What do we really need this Christmas?

And now for a happier story...

Cyrus the rescued roo

6. Cyrus the Roo rescued from Melbourne Airport has returned to the wild by Wildlife Victoria.

Last month an injured kangaroo was found confused and distressed trapped inside a pharmacy at Melbourne Airport. Goodness knows how he got in there? (it's hard enough to find your way around Airports as a human!). It was a very dangerous situation for him because kangaroos can die of stress, and it is really quite miraculous he survived it!

7. And lastly, we don't celebrate Thanksgiving here in Australia but I do like these photos of lucky turkeys taken by Jo-Anne McArthur, who have been spared the dinner table and now live out their lives at Farm Sanctuary.