Working Girls: Thoughts on Elephant Tourism

The highlight of my recent trip to Cambodia and Laos was playing with elephants at Elephant Village, near Luang Prabang, Laos. The camp is a sanctuary for elephants rescued from the logging industry, funded by tourists’ dollars. The girls seemed well fed– while we were there they all had a constant supply of food–clean, and relaxed, and the camp has a live-in vet and onsite hospital. Taking tourists for rides in exchange for food, care, protection is a much better situation for the elephants than backbreaking labor in the logging industry. I chose Elephant Village specifically because it is a sanctuary for “retired” logging elephants and felt good about spending my money there.

Elephant Village

But there is a dark side to elephant tourism in Asia. Not all elephant camps are peaceful havens for rescued log haulers, and not all elephant shows employ willing elephant performers: many buy young elephants that were captured in the wild and beaten to break their spirit in order to become tourist attractions. Read this article about the elephant tourism industry in Thailand if you want more horrifying details about the “breaking in” process. Some elephants are forced to do tricks such as ride tricycles and throw footballs, which may seem innocuous, until you consider how they are trained to do these things, and the conditions they live in as street performers. This article examines the different types of elephant tourism (trekking, begging, painting/shows, temple elephants, and safaris) and details the abuses often involved in each.

Elephant Village

Back to Laos. Elephant use in the logging industry in Laos is on the decline, leaving more and more elephants jobless and available to the highest bidder, or simply abandoned to starve in the wild. Sanctuary organizations such as Elephant Village give the discarded animals medical care, food, and protection, and allow them to form herds and families.

Elephant Village

Please do your research before patronizing an elephant tourism outfit to be sure the elephants are well cared for, and find out where they came from. My experience with the Elephant Village elephants was amazing, and I encourage you to meet and spend time with an elephant, but do it responsibly.

Foundations protecting Asian elephants:

Plane reading

Haute Pasture is on the road again, this time to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where we are doing as much eating as possible in order to report back to you guys. It’s a hard job.

On the plane, I caught up on some newsletters and articles that have been collecting dust on my desk. Here are some highlights:

ASPCA 2011 Annual Report, page 27

The ASPCA helped prevent the passage of “ag-gag” laws in Florida, Iowa, Minnesota, and New York last year. Ag-gag laws seek to prevent the leaking of graphic videos taken by undercover workers at factory farms by criminalizing the investigation of farm animal abuse. Exposing ethical and environmental violations on industrial farms would become much more difficult, to the benefit of the violating farms. Much more information about ag-gag laws is available on the ASPCA site.

Animal Welfare Institute Quarterly, Summer 2012, Vol 61 No 3

Did you know the USDA “organic” label does not guarantee anything about animal treatment? AWI has been working to help improve the recommendations given to the USDA by the National Organic Standards Board regarding minimum space allowances for poultry, vegetation availability for poultry and pigs, tail docking bans for pigs and cattle, and pain medication requirements for cattle dehorning.

Do you get confused by food labels? Who doesn’t! AWI has a downloadable guide to help you navigate the grocery store. Find out which labels actually indicate humane treatment, and which are meaningless. (I took a stab at deciphering egg labels last year; AWI’s guide is, ah, a bit more user-friendly.)

The Globalization of Animal Welfare,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2012, pp 122-133

About 2/3 of the poultry, meat, and eggs, and over half of the pork produced in the world come from factory farms, but no international regulations exist for farm animal treatment. Meat, dairy, and egg exports have exploded since 1980, while footage depicting cruel animal treatment has become easier to distribute, leading to increased pressure on Western governments to crack down on animal abuse internationally. The European Union leads the US in enacting laws to protect farm animals, having banned barren battery cages for hens and gestation crates for sows. In the US, agricultural lobbies continue to successfully prevent the creation of federally mandated animal welfare protections, despite increasing public interest. Developing countries in Latin America and Asia, seeking efficiency and economies of scale, lag behind the US and EU in animal protections, but in China, a law offering basic protections to animals has been proposed, and public awareness is growing. Multinational organizations such as the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations are leading the animal welfare effort at a global level, emphasizing not only ethics, but also the importance of food security and sustainability in developing countries. The FAO’s Gateway to Farm Animal Welfare provides easy access to animal welfare information to international users, explaining that “(b)y giving less economically developed country governments, professionals and producers online access to the latest information and the opportunity to contribute information relevant to their own situation, the portal will help to improve livestock welfare, health and productivity worldwide.” The private sector is beginning to recognize the importance of animal welfare to business sustainability and social responsibility, and groups such as Global Animal Partnership seek to unite the public and private sectors to form strategies that will benefit the stakeholders while progressing animal welfare improvement initiatives worldwide.

The GAP page for consumers is worth a read. The important point is:

We don’t need to work for a multi-lateral institution or be a world-famous chef or be part of the leadership of an international corporation to make a difference.

Each one of us, in our daily lives and in our own homes, can improve the lives of animals simply by choosing to support those farmers and ranchers who have a commitment to providing higher welfare to the animals they raise.

Know where your food comes from! Shop responsibly! Sound familiar?

In the news

Haute Pasture has been busy preparing for a trip to Asia. While we are slacking on the real posts, here are some headlines:

‘We Support Agriculture’ combats animal rights initiatives in Nebraska: A new political action group, formed by the Nebraska Cattlemen, Nebraska Farm Bureau, Nebraska Poultry Industries, Nebraska Pork Producers Association and the Nebraska State Dairy Association, is organizing to protect themselves from regulations, such as the banning of gestation crates.

Kaparot: Jewish leaders want to end animal killing: Some Jewish leaders are calling for the end of the kaparot tradition, in which chickens are ritually slaughtered. Jewish law is strict about the care of animals, and many feel kaparot is abusive.

‘Food, Inc.’ Wins News and Documentary Emmy Award: Good review of the documentary from Audubon Magazine’s blog.

Hoping to learn and post some insights about farm animal rights in Asia over the next couple weeks!

The Omnivore’s Dilemma QotD

From The Ethics of Eating Animals, p. 317

To visit a modern Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) is to enter a world that for all its technological sophistication is still designed on seventeenth-century Cartesian principles: Animals are treated as machines–“production units”–incapable of feeling pain. Since no thinking person can possibly believe this anymore, industrial animal agriculture depends on a suspension of disbelief on the part of the people who operate it and a willingness to avert one’s eyes on the part of everyone else.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma QotD

From The Ethics of Eating Animals, p. 333

The industrialization–and brutalization–of animals in America is a relatively new, evitable, and local phenomenon: No other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do. No other people in history has lived at quite so great a remove from the animals they eat. Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do. Tail docking and sow crates and beak clipping would disappear overnight, and the days of slaughtering four hundred head of cattle an hour would promptly come to an end–for who could stand the sight? Yes, meat would get more expensive. We’d probably eat a lot less of it, too, but maybe when we did eat animals we’d eat them with the consciousness, ceremony, and respect they deserve.

Interactive map of factory farming investigations

This is a very cool tool from Animal Visuals:

Factory Farm Investigations Mapped

The map was created to bring attention to the laws preventing filming inside factory farms, by showing the pattern of abuses within factory farms across the country. It’s a great tool for learning about specific investigations, and for demonstrating how widespread the problem of animal abuse on factory farms in the U.S. really is.

Politics vs conscience

New footage was released today from an undercover camera in a pig factory farm in Iowa:

Company’s Farm Practices in Question After Video Is Released

First of all: what is wrong with these people? Who can callously throw a piglet? And encourage others to do so? Who can justify cutting tails and castrating pigs without painkillers? How can someone make a career of doctoring animals and claim that a gestation crate is humane?

Secondly: how can one’s political allegiances override one’s basic human sensibility? The bill-supporting politicians are supporting animal abuse. The article says the politicians did not watch the video. Perhaps the way to think the abuse isn’t so bad is to ignore it, pretend it’s not real, stay in a state of denial by not looking at the proof. Disgusting.

On a brighter note, at least some of the grocers are doing the right thing and suspending shipments from the company that distributes pork from the offending farm. Kudos to Safeway and Kroger.

Chinese animal activism on the rise

Animal treatment awareness is increasing among Chinese citizens:

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2011-06/19/c_13937814.htm

Activists are pushing for the passage of the China Animal Protection Law, which has been languishing in the legislature for almost 2 years. The law would be China’s first comprehensive animal welfare law, and would include protections for food animals.

A heightened awareness of animal rights illustrates a cultural shift in China. From AFP:

“Compared with their parents’ or grandparents’ generations whose only concern was putting food on the table, the younger generations have the luxury of thinking more of other so-called ‘unessential’ things such as travel and companion animals,” said Li.

“When I was back in China in the 1980s, ‘animal protection’, ‘animal welfare’ and ‘compassion for non-human individuals’ were never phrases in China. Today, all these terms are known to many over there,” he added.

“The younger generation shall be a mighty force against animal cruelty in China.”

Iowa legislators support animal abuse and food poisoning

Iowa may be on the verge of passing a bill to make illegal the production, distribution, and possession of video or picture footage taken inside a factory farm without the owner’s permission.

Because factory farms are under-regulated and closed to the outside world, undercover investigators from animal rights groups sometimes take a job at a farm, only to document any health or animal treatment violations to release to the authorities and the public.

That sort of publicity is obviously not in the company’s best interests, but it IS in the public’s best interests: unsanitary conditions in factory farms can lead to outbreaks of food poisoning; and it’s in the animals’ best interests to have their living conditions improved. Happier animals also produce better food, but that’s a different argument.

Big agriculture is a huge industry in the Midwest, so it makes sense that legislators are pressured by lobbyists and constituents to support factory farming. According to Food & Water Watch, Iowa ranks first in the country in number of factory-farmed layer hens (averaging 1.3 million hens per farm–more than double the national average), first in factory-farmed hogs, and fourth in large cattle feedlots. Florida and Minnesota are considering similar bills. These bills are detrimental to food safety, and therefore public health, and should not be passed.

This quote from a New York Times article sums it up nicely:

“If they have nothing to hide and they are operating ethically, they should have no fear,” [Senator Matthew W. McCoy, Democrat of Des Moines] said.

Arguments against patronizing factory farms

From the McGill Daily:

http://www.mcgilldaily.com/2011/02/factory-farms-are-destroying-us/

This article gives a nice breakdown of the standard categories that vegetarian’s reasons for not eating meat usually fall into: health, environment, and animal cruelty.

The health issues related to eating red meat have long been known. E. coli and salmonella are in the news more and more often. The average meat eater probably doesn’t think about the link between MRSA and other bacteria-resistant infections, and meat consumption. The overuse of antibiotics in farm animals leads to stronger bacteria, to the point that known antibacterial drugs are useless in fighting off these infections. More and more people are getting sick from feces contamination on meat, as well: modern machines that tear apart the animals can spray the contents of the intestines onto the meat.

Factory farms are huge polluters, contributing more than 20% of the total amount of greenhouse gas emissions, and polluting waterways which leads to killing massive numbers of fish with animal excrement. Forests are clear cut to make way for farms or land to grow corn for livestock feed.

Nobody can deny that animals are abused in factory farms. Apparently there is a legal loophole allowing farms to participate in “common practices” without consequence, so if most other farms are abusing animals, it’s okay. Animals drop dead due to illness and injury, or are killed for being sick or too small.  In addition, the article points out the psychological hardships and injuries inflicted upon workers.

Here are a few of the horrifying factoids from this article:

  • 99% of the 10 billion animals slaughtered each year are factory farmed
  • it’s estimated that the average American eats the equivalent of 21,000 ENTIRE animals in his lifetime
  • the majority of antibiotics pumped into farm animals are banned in the EU
  • the FDA reclassified feces from dangerous contaminant to “cosmetic blemish”
  • nearly one-third of the planet’s surface is used for livestock