live animals in keychains – really?

Have you heard about this? I was just reading Soapbox with a View‘s blog. Is there no end to the cruelty that humans can inflict on animals?

Little fish or turtles are being sealed inside plastic containers, doomed to live a short miserable life being bumped around in someone’s bag or pocket. This is just gross. If you Google “live animals keychains China” you’ll get lots of hits. Apparently (but not surprisingly) China has no animal welfare laws.

Gah!

 

Bay of Spirits

I came across a book at the library by Farley Mowat. For some reason, that name rang a bell but I didn’t know why. It’s called Bay of Spirits: A Love Story and recalls his life in the early sixties when he was sailing around the coast of Newfoundland and met the woman who was to become his second wife.

Reading the book makes me realise I must have heard his name in connection with environmental or animal welfare concerns. Whilst he spent a lot of time in the company of Newfoundland fishermen, and had no reservations about eating fish and meat, he was against sport fishing, hunting and the needless slaughter of whales and seals.

Whilst his book is mostly non-judgmental, he does describe scenes which move me to tears. Once when his little boat was moored in a Newfoundland harbour, he and Claire woke to a whale slaughter. A pod of whales was in the harbour and every day for three days the men would be going out in their dories to stab and slash at the whales. The sea ran red with blood.

Another time, he was on a ship that became stuck in ice. The harp seals that are so much a part of that area were giving birth on the ice around the boat. How can we forget the traumatic pictures of sealers slaughtering seals, especially those limpid eyes of the white babies? The men on this particular ship were not sealers but all the same they started shooting the seals – for sport. “Rats of the sea” they called them. I was disgusted, as I have been since I first heard about this Canadian abomination when I was a teenager. Thirty years later, it’s still happening.

The final chapter of Farley’s book talks about a whale that was trapped in a pond, waiting for another spring tide to give it enough depth to leave. The men from the nearest village jumped in their boats and shot at it, over and over, for days, just for fun. Farley was out there while it still lived, could see the pockmarked skin where the bullets had hit it. One day it disappeared. It had died, and eventually rose to the surface, a sad reminder of man’s inhumanity. I was going to say, man’s inhumanity to any species other than his own, but that wouldn’t be right. Man’s inhumanity to ANY species.

Another repeating theme of this book is the mention of how the fish are getting more and more scarce. Well, is that surprising, given that humans have been overfishing the seas for so long that they can’t survive. When will people realise that by destroying the land and wildlife around us, we will ultimately destroy ourselves?

I am ashamed to call myself a member of the human race.

 

what if everyone stopped eating meat

Here’s an excellent article on the Crazy Sexy Life blog which answers that question that many vegans have to hear….

what would happen to the animals if everyone stopped eating meat?

And as a funny aside, here’s today’s update on notalwaysright.com, which is amusingly vegan-related.

 

world vegan month

I was under the impression that November 1st was World Vegan Day, but have since seen information to the effect that this is actually World Vegan MONTH. In the spirit of this, and because I just read this on Vegan.com’s blog, here’s a link to a site where you can sign a petition to

STOP FEEDING CHICKEN SHIT TO COWS

Yes, you read that right, they feed chicken “litter” to cows – isn’t it a lovely thought that the meat you might be eating (or the milk you’re drinking) has been raised with such a nutritious diet.

If this, or any of the other compelling information that is readily available out there about the benefits of plant-based diets, encourages you to eat less meat, here’s a vegan blog that has lots of delicious recipes for you to try.

 

Vegans and their emissions

First, I want to smugly point you towards a neat little video on You Tube. It’s short but points out something important – that eating a vegetarian diet can halve the emissions of “greenhouse gases” compared to a meat diet, but going vegan cuts it further to about one seventh, and an organic vegan diet one sixteenth.  (Of course, this study does not take into account the emissions of methane that result from a high fibre diet!)

Our family falls somewhere on the scale between vegan and organic vegan – we eat partly organic.

Now, I should point out that I’m not convinced that human activity is causing climate change, but I am all for (a) a cleaner planet and (b) compassion for animals.

Now, here are some pretty pictures of some of the flowers I’ve potted up for my garden path – I love them and I feel good when I look at them and hopefully you will too.

 

Board-breaking and picnicking

For once, we had a busy weekend.  Not just the usual grocery shopping.  But before I tell you about it, you really must check out this blog.  Here she is, telling us about what she did for Worldwide Knit in Public Day (which was on Saturday) and….well, you’ll just have to go and look…

Me, I took my sock knitting out with me on Saturday but I didn’t have time to knit.  Ninja Boy and I joined some of our other Taekwondo club members at a local park for a children’s festival.  Our instructor had booked a space so we could demonstrate our talents and recruit new students.  Every hour we’d do a quick warm-up, a pattern, some pad-kicking and board-breaking.  Ninja Boy’s speciality is a flying side kick over pads or people.

I’ve blurred out faces to preserve anonymity.  That’s our instructor there on the right.  And do you see those three people on the ground, being jumped over?  I’m on the right of the group! Ninja Boy’s foot has just split the board in the above photo.  The photo below is just afterwards, when he turned and jumped over three more people and broke another board.  In fact, he did three in a row.

Cool, huh!

So that was Saturday – dinner was late that evening.  On Sunday, dinner was at a local park.  It’s a beautiful place, right on the lake, with grass, picnic tables, sandy beach, and camping.  The thunderclouds were, once again, threatening, as they have on and off all week, but it was very pleasant down by the lake.  There was a cooling breeze which was a relief after spending a couple of hours slaving over a hot stove to get all the food ready!

Being vegan, I tend to overdo things when it comes to potluck-type events.  I assume that whatever anyone else brings won’t be edible so I take a lot of food.  I outdid myself this time – hummus and flax crackers, ratatouille, tofu loaf with ketchup, tomato salad, coconut and chocolate chip cookies, a huge bottle of apple juice, dill pickles and salt-and-pepper potato chips.  Most of it did get eaten.

The reason for the event was FOUR June birthdays.  Lego Nut is going to be 11 tomorrow, and my friend will be 75 later this month.  She suggested a picnic with some other friends who also have birthdays this month, so there was a total of 11 of us.  We had a great time, with good conversation, bocce ball, eating and even some swimming (the latter for two of my kids, anyway).

Good times!

 

The sad fate of pigs

I was just reading today’s updates at Vegan.com, an excellent blog which I discovered recently.   Like him, I won’t be watching the video he posted, because I don’t want to be crying my eyes out either, but I am posting the link to his post just in case you feel brave.

Turns out that Egypt is panicking over the swine flu and trucking large numbers of pigs off to be killed.  However, rather than attempt a “humane slaughter” (an oxymoron, I know) they are filling trucks with live pigs, piling them on top of each other and letting them die slowly and burying them in mass graves.

Pigs are mammals – they are intelligent animals – I am so sad to see one more example of the lack of respect and understanding that people have for non-human animals.  The only benefit I see from diseases such as swine flu, bird flu, “mad cow”, etc, is that maybe more people will become vegetarian or vegan.  Oh, for a world in which EVERYONE is vegan!

 

funkadelic friday

Hmmm, it’s Friday night and I last blogged on Monday.  Ooops!  I was stuck for a good title for this post, so I scrolled through my online dictionary and “funkadelic” was my favourite word on the list.

I was saying that I might get some knitting done on my volunteer shift at the hospital, and I did!  Rather than take the sweater sleeves, and maybe get confused from all the picking up and putting down, I started another pair of socks with some purple elann esprit.  I was very successful – despite a lot of traffic in and out of the ICU, I knitted a few inches of the leg.  A few people even commented – one lady asked me what I was knitting and said she remembers her granny knitting socks; one man asked for some socks and mittens “by Wednesday”; and another man asked for socks, but preferably  NOT in purple!

Considering it was my first shift on my own, I think I handled it pretty well.  Sadly, two people died that day, and I just knew that the bed-shaped cart with a blue tarp over the top was taking out their bodies.  Before I went in that day, Tai Chi Man had suggested that I surround myself in a protective “bubble” to keep unwanted energy out, and I certainly felt better (less headachey) this time.  I will make sure to do that every time I go to the hospital.

I had a lovely day today.  I went to my friend’s with my “computer tutor hat” on, then we went to lunch at my favourite restaurant (which will sadly be closing soon because the whole block is to be knocked down and redeveloped – I hope they open up again somewhere else) and then we had a walk around the base of a mountain just north of town with beautiful views of the lake.  Shame I didn’t take my camera with me.

Finally, here’s a link to a cartoon to make the vegetarians and vegans among you smile!

 

Temptations

I’m more than halfway through my raw month and I’ve had some temptations off the course.  Cooking dinner for my family every night has had me wishing I could share in their food, but apart from a couple of bites over the last three weeks I haven’t fallen off the proverbial wagon.

Another temptation has been an excellent cookbook that I found at the library this week.  It’s called Vegan Express and it’s written by Nava Atlas.  She has a website here.  I’ve just subscribed to her monthly newsletter.

Rarely have I found a cookbook that has so many recipes that I actually want to make.  Often I’ll look through the recipes in a cookbook and be disappointed, but I like the sound of most of these.  I have a long list of those I’d like to make after the end of the month! (I would rather the author didn’t use a microwave, but I suppose with the theme of the book being quick meals, she feels it justified.  I have a huge suspicion of microwave ovens.  They are only used occasionally in this book so it wouldn’t stop me buying it.)

Edited to add: I believe that eating a rawfood diet is the healthiest for our bodies.  It’s like putting Premium Plus gas in your car, giving it an oil change and washing and valeting it!  It just goes much better   This might be too much information for you, but every month at ovulation time I get a pain on one side or the other and  I swell up like I’ve eaten 10 pounds of beans, if you know what I mean!  Well, this month, it didn’t happen.  No symptoms.  I’m sure it’s the diet.

 

Chicken sweaters

Have you seen this article?

This lady made sweaters for her chickens.  They were rescued from battery cages and because they had pecked each other’s feathers out she was worried they’d get cold.

I’ve seen a site somewhere where they accept knitted sweaters from people for hens like this.  Ah, just found it, it’s here.  Isn’t that cute!

I’m just glad those chickens are no longer cooped up in cages, living a miserable life.  It’s sad that people have so little compassion for “mere birds”.