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Surfing the (Laser) Shark
This morning’s news presented two pieces of shark-related absurdity.
First, the Ministry for Primary Industries has confirmed that attempting to surf on the carcass of a shark is not a crime:
The Ministry for Primary Industries says it has found no breach of the Animal Welfare Act after complaints over a shark `surfing’ incident.
A spokesperson for MPI said the matter would not be investigated any further.
“We’ve determined that there has been no breach of the Animal Welfare Act as the shark had been dead for around 30 hours before video footage was recorded.”
Three men from the Bay of Plenty caused outrage when footage emerged of one man “surfing” behind a boat on the carcass of the thresher shark which was being towed by its tail.
Bay of Plenty Times, via the NZ Herald.
This is ridiculous on every possible level. First, if you read the full story, you will see that two fishermen accidentally killed a shark, then decided to tow the carcass back out to sea to dump it. And, because they’re fun loving, wacky, kiwi blokes they decided to…surf it…out…to sea. I’m not entirely sure how anyone could come up with that. Second, the whole Herald story is about how surfing a deceased shark is not a breach of the Animal Welfare Act 1999.
Here’s a hint, guys: The Animal Welfare Act 1999 applies to living animals.
And, third, slipped in there without fanfare is the renaming of the Ministry responsible for animal welfare. The Ministry for Agriculture and Forestry, merged with Fisheries etc is now the Ministry for Primary Industries. Would it be possible to make the ridiculous conflict of interest at the heart of New Zealand’s animal welfare regime more obvious? The Ministry responsible for promoting primary industries (like, say, industrial farming) is responsible for prosecuting breaches of animal welfare (like, say, much industrial farming).
Wired magazine presents even more shark-related madness though: “Scientists” (hint: they’re not scientists) have mounted a laser on a shark:
Relax, Dr Evil. Your inspired request for “sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached” has finally been fulfilled in the real world.
Marine biologist-cum-TV personality Luke Tipple attached a 50-milliwatt green laser to a lemon shark off the coast of the Bahamas in late April. The escapade was sponsored by Wicked Lasers, a consumer-focused laser manufacturer based in Hong Kong that produces some of the most brilliant — and potentially dangerous — handheld lasers in the world.
“This was definitely a world first,” Tipple told Wired. “Initially, I told them no. I thought it was a frivolous stunt. But then I considered that it would give us an opportunity to test our clips and attachments, and whatever is attached to that clip, I really don’t care. It was a low-powered laser that couldn’t be dangerous to anyone, and there’s actually useful application of having a laser attached to the animal.”
Tipple said the experiment was instructive in a number of ways. For starters, he was able to further test his clamping apparatus, which is typically used for traditional data-aquistion equipment.
That’s right. Clamping a laser to a shark was great scientific research. Because it helped test the clamp. Well, that addresses all my animal welfare concerns right there.
Featured
Just a quick note on the Animal Justice Fund, administered by SAFE, funded from Jan Cameron’s (founder of the hugely-successful outdoor equipment company, Kathmandu) fortune which allocates $2 million for whistleblowers. Between $5 000 and $30 000 can be awarded in each instance that leads to a successful prosecution or ‘significant animal welfare outcome.’
To date, at least six workers have ‘dobbed in’ bosses for animal cruelty. But none want to accept the reward.
All were for dairy farms and piggeries. None of the workers were still employed by the farms they were laying complaints against, so the cases and information are considered ‘historical’ and hence a low priority for investigation. Four of these cases were referred to MAF. According to SAFE’s Hans Kriek:
Paddocks were in bad shape, there were stones and lame cows. There were high mortality rates amongst calves. Dying animals were being left to rot in paddocks. With the pig farms we had the usual complaints … that the conditions were terrible and enclosures weren’t cleaned out and the animals were standing a foot deep in their own muck.
Yet, no breaches of the relevant welfare codes were found in any case. Continue reading
As of 1 July 2010, the use of any animal in a circus has been banned in Bolivia. A handful of other countries have banned the use of wild animals in circuses but only Bolivia has banned exploitation of domestic animals in circuses as well.
The Bolivian law, which states that the use of all animals in circuses ‘constitutes an act of cruelty’ was enacted on 1 July 2009, with operators given a year to comply.
The bill took two years to pass through both chambers of the Plurinational Assembly, meeting stiff opposition from the eastern states of Bolivia where there was concern that the law would be expanded to include bullfighting, which is popular in rural villages. Bullfighting remains legal in Bolivia.
The legislature were eventually won over by a screening of videos shot by undercover circus infiltrators in Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia co-ordinated and funded by Animal Defence International (ADI), a London-based NGO which found that ill-treatment and violence against animals in circuses is commonplace.
The oddly familiar-looking Constitutional Court of Spain
Bullfighting was banned in the autonomous Spanish region of Catalonia on 28 July this year, with the ban coming into full effect in 2012.
Now, three months to the day later, the Spanish Constitutional Court (housed in a rather Beehive-esque building) has accepted an appeal lodged by the Partido Popular (People’s Party, PP) challenging Catalonia’s ban on cultural, economic and administrative grounds. The PP is a conservative, nationalist party known for such other legislative projects as restricting immigration to Catalonia and deporting immigrants who have not learnt the Catalan language to proposed minimum standards.
Spain’s Catalonian regional parliament has banned bullfighting in a vote of 68 – 55 with nine abstaining.
It is the second Spanish region after the Canary Islands (which banned bullfighting in 1991) to outlaw the practice and the first on the mainland.
Bullfighting is a brutal spectacle in which the torture and death of the bull is the end of a life-long process of abuse and mistreatment (I’ve written on this in more detail here) and this is a significant victory for a coalition of Catalonian animal rights groups called “Prou!” meaning “Enough!” They initated the vote by submitting a 180 000-signature petition to the parliament, calling for a ban.
The vote was not a cut-and-dry animal welfare issue as the rejection of this emblematically Spanish tradition is also widely interpreted as animated by separatist sentiment. Of Spain’s semi-autonomous regions, Catalunya has the greatest degree of autonomy along with the Basque region. It has even been suggested that the vote was calculated in last-minute lobbying as retaliation for a recent decision from Spain’s Constitutional court which has curtailed some of the proudly-independent region’s autonomy in law-making.
This is an exciting advance made against one of the most tradition-bound forms of animal suffering. The commercial significance of the ‘sport’ falls far short of that in the Spanish capital of Madrid and Andalucia to the South, when the law comes into effect in 2012 it will close Barcelona’s last remaining bullring, La Monumental. This may limit the spread of the ban to the other regions.
But there is still work to do. Activists have now set their sights on a ban on the Correbous, an annual festival in the region in which flaming torches and even fireworks are fastened to the bulls’ horns and they are set loose, frightened, disoriented and often suffering burns, to run around an enclosure for the amusement of onlookers.
I’m fed up. I’m normally very positive when it comes to food, and coffee. My diet is the (vegan) opposite of James’ porridge-and-apricots hike: Varied, spicy, and (too often) pricey fare. On the weekend, I often relax by visiting a cafe with a friend or a novel. When I need to plan my time in a busy patch, an espresso and my diary is the go.
And I think that it is easy to make, and to buy, varied and enjoyable vegan food in Auckland (and in Hamilton, Wellington, and Christchurch, if not elsewhere in New Zealand). There are a lot of vegan options in cafes and restaurants. Sure, it’s not New York and it’s not Melbourne (If anyone reading this wants to open a Lord of the Fries franchise in Auckland: I and my friends will keep you in business. Not joking.), but it’s not bad.
Cafes, however? I’m going to be honest. Most of the time, they don’t capitalise on the vegan market well enough. That’s not good for veganism, not good for vegans, and not good for cafe owners. Continue reading
Introduction
Last week, Crafar Farms skulked back into the news. And so did cattle rustling, a phenomenon most of us last encountered in a Spaghetti Western. However, Sunday last week, the Herald reported the theft of 1,000 to 2,000 cows. To quote:
Michael Stiassny is missing a few cows – more than 1000. Stiassny was appointed receiver of the Crafarms group in October after the family-owned company collapsed under heavy debts and multiple prosecutions for effluent discharge.
The stolen cows have a commercial value in excess of one million dollars. So what is Crafar’s receiver to do? Call the police, of course:
Stiassny … said he would be approaching police.
This is probably no surprise. After all, cattle are property. Stealing cattle is theft. Theft is a crime. When a crime is committed, you call the police. Simple. But a different logic applied in September, when Crafar was outed for gross violations of the most basic welfare standards. Breaches of the Animal Welfare Act 1999 (the Act) are crimes, but no one called the police on Crafar. Why not?
