Post by Activist4Animals on Jan 28, 2006 0:11:43 GMT
13 February 2006:
International Day of Protest against Chinese Fur
In protest of China's reluctance to act against the horrific treatment of animals in its fur industry, an international day of protest will take place on Monday, 13 February 2006 in front of Chinese embassies and consulates worldwide. Organizations and individuals from all over the world are invited to join this initiative. Please pass on the call, join an existing vigil, or organize one in your area or country. Wearing black is recommended.
If you are organizing a vigil please write to us at chinesefur@arforum.org so we can add your name and contact information to a list that will appear on this page shortly.
[glow=red,2,300]more>http://fur.arforum.org/[/glow]
For more info and 4 adding your name on this list please contact:janeart3@hotmail.com
[glow=red,2,300]More about Chinese Fur and World Wide Protests Against this Brutality:
[/glow]
www.xanga.com/UCA4A
REMINDER: Have you signed the petition?
www.heathermillsmccartney.com/petition.php
Eastern Europe back in the dog & cat fur trade
Eastern Europe is back in the dog & cat fur trade, from ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2006
BRUSSELS, BUDAPEST, SOFIA--
Dog and cat fur of eastern European origin appears to be back on the market, almost a decade after the post-Communist rise of animal advocacy put an official end to the centuries-old budka system of funding animal control by selling pelts. "The long battle to keep cat and dog fur out of Europe has focused on trying to ban the import of pelts from China-until now," Humane Society International said, inviting media to a December 8, 2005 press conference at the European Parliament headquarters in Brussels. Featuring HIS investigator Richard Swain and Heather Mills McCartney, wife of composer Sir Paul McCartney, the press conference was called to support a bill against importing dog and cat fur introduced by European Parliament members Struan Stevenson, Phillip Whitehead, and Paulo Casaca.
"In December 2003, Stevenson won the backing of the majority of the European Parliament for a ban. Three hundred and forty six members supported the declaration, which subsequently became a formal resolution of the European Parliament to the Commission and the Council of Ministers, " recounted Stevenson's parliamentary secretary, Luisa Strani. "It was only the 6th time in history that the Parliament has obtained a majority of signatures on a Declaration," Strani said, but the requested legislation is still not in effect.
The Brussels press conference was the first of a two-part televised hit at the Chinese dog and cat fur trade. The second part was an hour-long Larry King Live broadcast on December 11, 2005 featuring Swain, Mills McCartney, actor Alec Baldwin, and Representatives Jim Moran (D-Virginia) and Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) as an expert panel commenting on video of dogs and cats being killed and roughly handled. In Brussels, however, Swain showed an undercover video indicating that dog and cat fur may also be entering the EU from the Czech Republic. The video showed a worker in a Czech warehouse telling investigators that most of the cat and dog skins hanging on nearby rails were from local sources. Only a few, the worker said, were from China. "Domestic cats are stolen off the streets [for fur], and we're talking about 2,000 to 3,000 just in the Czech Republic, not in the whole of Europe," Mills McCartney alleged. A second expose of dog and cat fur originating from eastern Europe aired a few days later in Germany. "An undercover investigation has revealed a booming trade in dog fur coats from eastern Europe, some of which are likely to be on sale in Britain," summarized Katy Duke and Elizabeth Day of the London Telegraph. "The fur, which comes from both strays and captured pets, is often re-labelled to disguise its origins before being stitched into coats and re-dyed," Duke and Day continued. The investigation focused on Bulgaria." "There is a massive industry based on the systematic killing of dogs," Bulgarian SPCA president Yordanka Zrcheva told the cameras. "There are dog fur factories all over Bulgaria, and they pro duce all sorts of items, like fur coats, leather shoes and bags made from dogs, and so on." "Around 10,000 dogs are collected and killed in Sofia alone every year, often shipped straight to fur factories from the dog pounds,"
Doctors for Animals spokesperson Rumi Becker said. "The so-called fur lords who run the factories are farming the dogs on the street. They don't have to feed or house them or do anything except round them up and then skin them. I bought a black and white coat labelled Korean wolf," Becker claimed, displaying the garment. "I asked if it was made with street dog fur, and the vendor said it was, but that I should keep my voice down. I was pretending to be a dealer, and asked if it would be possible to have more. She told me she had 750 in a storeroom." Commented Sofia animal advocate Alina Lilova, "This is not the first report of its kind. Until recently, most of the allegations I'd heard didn't seem to be backed up by serious investigation, and I hoped they would be false. But these look credible." Lilova was aware of some dealing in dog and cat fur, but not on a commercial scale.
"Earlier in 2005," Lilova recalled, "the media in Ruse, a city by the Danube, reported that the local German-Bulgarian animal protection society confiscated the dogs of a man accused by his neighbors of systematically killing his own dogs and selling their coats, based on actual sightings of gruesome things going on in his yard." The solution to the problem, Lilova pointed out, will be to sterilize enough dogs and cats so that eastern Europe no longer has a surplus. "The Sofia humane organizations have miraculously achieved a small victory with the new mayor and are allowed to invite international teams to help sterilize outdoor dogs," Lilova added. "They also received an encouraging letter from the national veterinary service. The problem is that it is not clear who could be invited. We would need several clinics to cover the entire city in a relatively short period of time."
Lilova said she was studying the ANIMAL PEOPLE online how-to materials on fundraising in hopes of becoming better able to help. Vier Pfoten, an Aust-rian group already sterilizing dogs in Sofia and many other parts of eastern Europe, issued yet another expose of the eastern European dog and cat fur traffic on December 22. "In Hungary we identified the fur trim on a winter coat as raccoon dog," also known as tanuki," e-mailed Helmut Dengler of Vier Pfoten. "The coat was bought in a Budapest discount shop in Budapest. The fur was tested by a method based on analysis and comparison of the protein structure." As tanuki are raised for fur and meat in China and Korea, that coat was probably of Asian origin. But Vier Pfoten also found dog fur coats of less evident origin sold by a German online vendor. "PETA Germany identified dog fur trim on a coat at the fashion store Peek & Cloppenburg in Munich," Dengler added. "The Dutch animal protection organisation Bont voor Dieren has also found evidence of cat and dog fur trim."
The budkas
European demand for dog and cat pelts fell off to nil in the early post-Communist years, coinciding with a global fur sales slump. Often listed among the low-bid lots at international fur auctions, dog and cat fur vanished from the sales reports by the mid-1990s. As the budkas were no longer profitable, replacing them with western-style animal control agencies became politically popular. For about five years, beginning after French actress-turned-activist Brigitte Bardot began campaigning on behalf of Romanian dogs in 1996, western European donors poured tens of millions of euros into efforts to take eastern Europe directly from the budkas to no-kill animal control, whether or not the necessary high-volume dog and cat sterilization programs were up and running, and regardless of whether the public was adequately educated about the need to sterilize, vaccinate, and keep pets from roaming. Many budkas were replaced by quasi-no-kill canine concentration camps, where dogs die of starvation, disease, exposure, and untreated wounds suffered in fighting to stay alive. Operated both by local governments and by nonprofit organizations, so-called "no-kill shelters" scattered through the former Communist nations continue to hold dogs and cats in crowded, often filthy conditions, with little chance of adoption. Most of the money sent to help impounded animals during the 1996-2001 time frame appears to have been siphoned off through corruption. The most flagrant offender, Wolfgang Ullrich, in April 2003 drew a 12-year prison sentence in Germany for embezzling as much as $45 million from funds donated in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland to assist shelters in Romania. There were some successes in dismantling the budkas. The budka in Kiev, Ukraine, clubbed and skinned as many as 40,000-50,000 animals per year until former United Nations journalist Tamara Tarnawska exposed the brutality in 1996. A new mayor in March 1997 turned the budka site over to SOS Animals Ukraine, a charity Tarnawska formed to promote pet sterilization and adoption. A new agency created to take over animal control, called Animals In The City, allegedly continued many of the budka abuses, including legal harassment and alleged violent intimidation of critics. But officially, Kiev has stayed out of the dog and cat fur industry. Galati, Romania, got out of the fur trade at about the same time by ceasing to operate the city pound as a budka, and by converting a defunct fox farm once staffed by jail inmates into a pound to help hold the resultant overflow of dogs. Both facilities are now assisted by groups whose work parallels that of the nonprofit shelter auxiliaries common in the U.S.: Help Labus at the former fox farm, ROLDA at the former budka, the latter aided by the U.S. group Romania Animal Rescue. In eastern Europe, as in the U.S., where humane society involvement in pounds was long partly motivated by trying to prevent the sale of animals to laboratories, an institutional humane presence tends to reduce pound abuses. However, the economic trends that favored budka closure and humane involvement also favored privatization. Initially, that was not a big problem. With no profit left in pelts, bidders on animal control contracts tended to be either non-profit humane societies, or in a few cases, for-profit companies with western European pet store adoption connections. (Despite many rumors, no traffic in eastern European dogs to western European laboratories has ever been confirmed.) A resurgent dog-and-cat fur market driven by Chinese exports appears to have changed the economics. Some municipal agencies may have quietly returned to the budka approach. Corrupt animal control employees are suspected in several cities of selling dog and cat pelts without official permission, and pocketing the proceeds-- although the administrators may be looking the other way, to avoid having to pay higher salaries to attract a better class of worker. Pelt brokers may also be seeking animal control contracts in places where dog and cat intakes are still high, with little done to promote sterilization and pet identification. Cutting off the import of any dog or cat fur into the European Union would be one quick way to curtail any revival of the budka system, as this would end access to the most lucrative part of the market. National bans on importing dog and cat fur are already in place in Australia, Belgium, Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, Switzerland, and the U.S., but enforcement has been questionable, since most dog and cat fur items are too small and inexpensive to attract customs inspectors' attention.
A Shocking Look Inside Chinese Fur Farms
It would seem from the photos and videos showing the mass slaughter of cats and dogs for their pelts, and from what we know of certain other Chinese customs such as the horrific and indescribable suffering inflicted on Moon Bears kept in filthy, tiny cages for their bile, the cats and dogs used for food in certain provinces (remember SARS last winter?) and the general level of cruelty and indifference to all sentient beings, human and non-human alike, the public must loudly condemn these practices and take action to see that the Chinese government makes changes. The best way to accomplish that given the present climate of indifference and our own government's unwillingness to make demands on the Chinese, is by a consumer boycott of Chinese goods in preparation for a mass boycott of the Olympics in Beijing.
[glow=red,2,300] Start reading
those labels!!![/glow]
[glow=red,2,300]China's cruel and deceptive exploitation!
Boycott Beijing[/glow]
International Day of Protest against Chinese Fur
In protest of China's reluctance to act against the horrific treatment of animals in its fur industry, an international day of protest will take place on Monday, 13 February 2006 in front of Chinese embassies and consulates worldwide. Organizations and individuals from all over the world are invited to join this initiative. Please pass on the call, join an existing vigil, or organize one in your area or country. Wearing black is recommended.
If you are organizing a vigil please write to us at chinesefur@arforum.org so we can add your name and contact information to a list that will appear on this page shortly.
[glow=red,2,300]more>http://fur.arforum.org/[/glow]
For more info and 4 adding your name on this list please contact:janeart3@hotmail.com
[glow=red,2,300]More about Chinese Fur and World Wide Protests Against this Brutality:
[/glow]
www.xanga.com/UCA4A
REMINDER: Have you signed the petition?
www.heathermillsmccartney.com/petition.php
Eastern Europe back in the dog & cat fur trade
Eastern Europe is back in the dog & cat fur trade, from ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2006
BRUSSELS, BUDAPEST, SOFIA--
Dog and cat fur of eastern European origin appears to be back on the market, almost a decade after the post-Communist rise of animal advocacy put an official end to the centuries-old budka system of funding animal control by selling pelts. "The long battle to keep cat and dog fur out of Europe has focused on trying to ban the import of pelts from China-until now," Humane Society International said, inviting media to a December 8, 2005 press conference at the European Parliament headquarters in Brussels. Featuring HIS investigator Richard Swain and Heather Mills McCartney, wife of composer Sir Paul McCartney, the press conference was called to support a bill against importing dog and cat fur introduced by European Parliament members Struan Stevenson, Phillip Whitehead, and Paulo Casaca.
"In December 2003, Stevenson won the backing of the majority of the European Parliament for a ban. Three hundred and forty six members supported the declaration, which subsequently became a formal resolution of the European Parliament to the Commission and the Council of Ministers, " recounted Stevenson's parliamentary secretary, Luisa Strani. "It was only the 6th time in history that the Parliament has obtained a majority of signatures on a Declaration," Strani said, but the requested legislation is still not in effect.
The Brussels press conference was the first of a two-part televised hit at the Chinese dog and cat fur trade. The second part was an hour-long Larry King Live broadcast on December 11, 2005 featuring Swain, Mills McCartney, actor Alec Baldwin, and Representatives Jim Moran (D-Virginia) and Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) as an expert panel commenting on video of dogs and cats being killed and roughly handled. In Brussels, however, Swain showed an undercover video indicating that dog and cat fur may also be entering the EU from the Czech Republic. The video showed a worker in a Czech warehouse telling investigators that most of the cat and dog skins hanging on nearby rails were from local sources. Only a few, the worker said, were from China. "Domestic cats are stolen off the streets [for fur], and we're talking about 2,000 to 3,000 just in the Czech Republic, not in the whole of Europe," Mills McCartney alleged. A second expose of dog and cat fur originating from eastern Europe aired a few days later in Germany. "An undercover investigation has revealed a booming trade in dog fur coats from eastern Europe, some of which are likely to be on sale in Britain," summarized Katy Duke and Elizabeth Day of the London Telegraph. "The fur, which comes from both strays and captured pets, is often re-labelled to disguise its origins before being stitched into coats and re-dyed," Duke and Day continued. The investigation focused on Bulgaria." "There is a massive industry based on the systematic killing of dogs," Bulgarian SPCA president Yordanka Zrcheva told the cameras. "There are dog fur factories all over Bulgaria, and they pro duce all sorts of items, like fur coats, leather shoes and bags made from dogs, and so on." "Around 10,000 dogs are collected and killed in Sofia alone every year, often shipped straight to fur factories from the dog pounds,"
Doctors for Animals spokesperson Rumi Becker said. "The so-called fur lords who run the factories are farming the dogs on the street. They don't have to feed or house them or do anything except round them up and then skin them. I bought a black and white coat labelled Korean wolf," Becker claimed, displaying the garment. "I asked if it was made with street dog fur, and the vendor said it was, but that I should keep my voice down. I was pretending to be a dealer, and asked if it would be possible to have more. She told me she had 750 in a storeroom." Commented Sofia animal advocate Alina Lilova, "This is not the first report of its kind. Until recently, most of the allegations I'd heard didn't seem to be backed up by serious investigation, and I hoped they would be false. But these look credible." Lilova was aware of some dealing in dog and cat fur, but not on a commercial scale.
"Earlier in 2005," Lilova recalled, "the media in Ruse, a city by the Danube, reported that the local German-Bulgarian animal protection society confiscated the dogs of a man accused by his neighbors of systematically killing his own dogs and selling their coats, based on actual sightings of gruesome things going on in his yard." The solution to the problem, Lilova pointed out, will be to sterilize enough dogs and cats so that eastern Europe no longer has a surplus. "The Sofia humane organizations have miraculously achieved a small victory with the new mayor and are allowed to invite international teams to help sterilize outdoor dogs," Lilova added. "They also received an encouraging letter from the national veterinary service. The problem is that it is not clear who could be invited. We would need several clinics to cover the entire city in a relatively short period of time."
Lilova said she was studying the ANIMAL PEOPLE online how-to materials on fundraising in hopes of becoming better able to help. Vier Pfoten, an Aust-rian group already sterilizing dogs in Sofia and many other parts of eastern Europe, issued yet another expose of the eastern European dog and cat fur traffic on December 22. "In Hungary we identified the fur trim on a winter coat as raccoon dog," also known as tanuki," e-mailed Helmut Dengler of Vier Pfoten. "The coat was bought in a Budapest discount shop in Budapest. The fur was tested by a method based on analysis and comparison of the protein structure." As tanuki are raised for fur and meat in China and Korea, that coat was probably of Asian origin. But Vier Pfoten also found dog fur coats of less evident origin sold by a German online vendor. "PETA Germany identified dog fur trim on a coat at the fashion store Peek & Cloppenburg in Munich," Dengler added. "The Dutch animal protection organisation Bont voor Dieren has also found evidence of cat and dog fur trim."
The budkas
European demand for dog and cat pelts fell off to nil in the early post-Communist years, coinciding with a global fur sales slump. Often listed among the low-bid lots at international fur auctions, dog and cat fur vanished from the sales reports by the mid-1990s. As the budkas were no longer profitable, replacing them with western-style animal control agencies became politically popular. For about five years, beginning after French actress-turned-activist Brigitte Bardot began campaigning on behalf of Romanian dogs in 1996, western European donors poured tens of millions of euros into efforts to take eastern Europe directly from the budkas to no-kill animal control, whether or not the necessary high-volume dog and cat sterilization programs were up and running, and regardless of whether the public was adequately educated about the need to sterilize, vaccinate, and keep pets from roaming. Many budkas were replaced by quasi-no-kill canine concentration camps, where dogs die of starvation, disease, exposure, and untreated wounds suffered in fighting to stay alive. Operated both by local governments and by nonprofit organizations, so-called "no-kill shelters" scattered through the former Communist nations continue to hold dogs and cats in crowded, often filthy conditions, with little chance of adoption. Most of the money sent to help impounded animals during the 1996-2001 time frame appears to have been siphoned off through corruption. The most flagrant offender, Wolfgang Ullrich, in April 2003 drew a 12-year prison sentence in Germany for embezzling as much as $45 million from funds donated in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland to assist shelters in Romania. There were some successes in dismantling the budkas. The budka in Kiev, Ukraine, clubbed and skinned as many as 40,000-50,000 animals per year until former United Nations journalist Tamara Tarnawska exposed the brutality in 1996. A new mayor in March 1997 turned the budka site over to SOS Animals Ukraine, a charity Tarnawska formed to promote pet sterilization and adoption. A new agency created to take over animal control, called Animals In The City, allegedly continued many of the budka abuses, including legal harassment and alleged violent intimidation of critics. But officially, Kiev has stayed out of the dog and cat fur industry. Galati, Romania, got out of the fur trade at about the same time by ceasing to operate the city pound as a budka, and by converting a defunct fox farm once staffed by jail inmates into a pound to help hold the resultant overflow of dogs. Both facilities are now assisted by groups whose work parallels that of the nonprofit shelter auxiliaries common in the U.S.: Help Labus at the former fox farm, ROLDA at the former budka, the latter aided by the U.S. group Romania Animal Rescue. In eastern Europe, as in the U.S., where humane society involvement in pounds was long partly motivated by trying to prevent the sale of animals to laboratories, an institutional humane presence tends to reduce pound abuses. However, the economic trends that favored budka closure and humane involvement also favored privatization. Initially, that was not a big problem. With no profit left in pelts, bidders on animal control contracts tended to be either non-profit humane societies, or in a few cases, for-profit companies with western European pet store adoption connections. (Despite many rumors, no traffic in eastern European dogs to western European laboratories has ever been confirmed.) A resurgent dog-and-cat fur market driven by Chinese exports appears to have changed the economics. Some municipal agencies may have quietly returned to the budka approach. Corrupt animal control employees are suspected in several cities of selling dog and cat pelts without official permission, and pocketing the proceeds-- although the administrators may be looking the other way, to avoid having to pay higher salaries to attract a better class of worker. Pelt brokers may also be seeking animal control contracts in places where dog and cat intakes are still high, with little done to promote sterilization and pet identification. Cutting off the import of any dog or cat fur into the European Union would be one quick way to curtail any revival of the budka system, as this would end access to the most lucrative part of the market. National bans on importing dog and cat fur are already in place in Australia, Belgium, Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, Switzerland, and the U.S., but enforcement has been questionable, since most dog and cat fur items are too small and inexpensive to attract customs inspectors' attention.
A Shocking Look Inside Chinese Fur Farms
It would seem from the photos and videos showing the mass slaughter of cats and dogs for their pelts, and from what we know of certain other Chinese customs such as the horrific and indescribable suffering inflicted on Moon Bears kept in filthy, tiny cages for their bile, the cats and dogs used for food in certain provinces (remember SARS last winter?) and the general level of cruelty and indifference to all sentient beings, human and non-human alike, the public must loudly condemn these practices and take action to see that the Chinese government makes changes. The best way to accomplish that given the present climate of indifference and our own government's unwillingness to make demands on the Chinese, is by a consumer boycott of Chinese goods in preparation for a mass boycott of the Olympics in Beijing.
[glow=red,2,300] Start reading
those labels!!![/glow]
[glow=red,2,300]China's cruel and deceptive exploitation!
Boycott Beijing[/glow]