Rye Harbour Nature Reserve on a very cold Sunday afternoon yesterday.
Thought for the Day
Animals are God’s creatures, not human property, nor utilities, nor resources, nor commodities, but precious beings in God’s sight. … Christians whose eyes are fixed on the awfulness of crucifixion are in a special position to understand the awfulness of innocent suffering. The Cross of Christ is God’s absolute identification with the weak, the powerless, and the vulnerable, but most of all with unprotected, undefended, innocent suffering.
The Revd Professor Andrew Linzey, PhD, DD
Thought for the Day
Sales of free-range eggs have overtaken those from battery farms for the first time, it emerged yesterday. According to the British Egg Information Service, 51% of eggs bought last month were free-range, while 41% came from caged hens. The remainder came from a mixture of barn and organic farms.
The trend comes amid strong growth generally in sales of organic produce, which have risen more than fourfold since 2000.
But sales of free range eggs also received a significant boost from Jamie Oliver’s Fowl Dinners programme which highlighted issues of animal welfare this year, according to a spokesman for BEIS.
Sissinghurst Gardens
Thought for the Day
Rheumatoid arthritis patients may be able to improve their symptoms by switching to a vegan and gluten-free diet, a study in Sweden has found.
Over a year Frostegård and his team followed 30 patients who kept up the new diet for at least three months and 28 on a normal diet, monitoring the progress of the disease and levels of various chemicals in the blood. By the end of the study the vegans had a modest improvement in the number of swollen joints (down from an average of 5.3 to 4.3). There was also a large drop in the level of a chemical in the blood called CRP, which doctors use to measure inflammatory activity in the body. There was no significant improvement in the group who ate a normal diet.
At the same time, the vegans developed a lower body mass index, had lower levels of bad cholesterol and higher levels of immune system factors that potentially inhibit the inflammatory reaction. The research was reported in the journal Arthritis Research and Therapy.
Frostegård conceded the study was too small to draw definitive conclusions and that it would need to be repeated. Convincing patients to switch diets for such a long time was very difficult, he said. “There is no big money from the drug companies for these kind of studies.”
Canadian Seal Kill
Here’s a first-hand account of the kill by Mark Glover of Respect for Animals and Humane Society International. Here’s a short extract:
The hunt has been going on for years. It takes place in areas of the country where there are a number of marginal constituencies, and in the end it boils down to crude electoral arithmetic. The majority of Canadians across the country may want the hunt banned, but because of key marginal seats in fishing constituencies in the east, it would take a brave politician to stand up and call for an end to it.
Sealers are fishermen, and as such they are all members of a vocal and powerful fishing union. But the annual seal hunt doesn’t create extra jobs for them. The hunts only last four or five days and, though the numbers vary from year to year, no more than 5,000 fishermen go out on each hunt.
On top of this, a sealer gets less than 5% of his income from sealing. Any money made goes to the boat owners who charge up to 70% of the fishermen’s income just for taking them out on the boats. Hunting seals is certainly not anyone’s main source of income, and it’s a distortion by the Canadian government to try to make people believe it is.
There’s still a notion that seals should be killed to help with the recovery of fish stocks. This is scientifically bogus. Back in 1992, when the Canadian cod stocks collapsed, 40,000 fishermen fell out of work overnight. The Canadian authorities, who had overseen the demise of that cod population, needed to blame something and they blamed the seals. That there are too many seals around and they impact on the fish is an idea that still persists today.
The seal killing is now worse than ever. Looking back to the late 80s, when the anti-sealing campaign was previously at its peak, the number of deaths was not as high as it is now. I worked for Greenpeace at that point and I clearly remember that the quotas set for seals were around 180,000. This year the quota is 275,000.
