Genocide (this week in the news)
A Battle Against Pesky Geese Turns Lethal in North Jersey
His ponds overrun by goose feathers, his parks virtually abandoned because of goose droppings, George W. Devanney was a suburban politician with a problem.
And to deal with what Mr. Devanney, the manager of Union County, N.J., saw both as a serious nuisance and a potential public health concern, he turned to a drastic solution: Over the past two days, federal animal control workers have herded about 1,000 geese from parks and public areas into fenced pens and shoved them into the backs of specially equipped pickup trucks, where they were asphyxiated with carbon dioxide gas….
Read the whole article at: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/03/nyregion/03GEES.html
Death Sought for Animals in Monkeypox Case
David Crawford of Boulder, Colo., acting director of the Prairie Dog Coalition, which defends wild prairie dog habitats and opposes keeping the animals as pets, called the euthanasia suggestion “a classic case of blaming the victim.”
“This problem was caused by human beings, and it’s easy for us to take the `kill them all’ approach,” he said. “But if this was a human population, we’d be aghast at an order to kill. This calls for quarantine and testing, not euthanasia.”
Two weeks ago, at a meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices at the centers, Dr. Gregory A. Poland, a committee member and the chief of vaccine research at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, asked why the agency had not already ordered all possibly exposed animals killed.
An official of the centers replied that people became attached to their pets.
“So what?” Dr. Poland said. “I know what we’d do if this was an outbreak of mad cow disease. We’d kill the whole herd.”
Read the whole article: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/03/science/03POX.html
Canada Report: Mad Cow May Be From U.S.
Canada’s lone case of mad cow disease may have originated in the United States, according to a report issued Thursday by Canadian investigators, who have been unable to pinpoint the source of the infection.
In its final report on the case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, detected May 20 in Alberta, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency raised the possibility the disease arrived in Canada in a large 1998 shipment of pregnant U.S. cows….
Read the whole article at: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Canada-Mad-Cow.html
[Our yearly slaughter of 9,000,000,000+ hens (and an equivalent number of male hatchlings) should count as a genocide of monumental proportions, too.] Here is a letter to the editor from 7/2: “Animal Welfare at KFC”
“The existence of organized cruelty - that is, cruelty practiced as a matter of social principle or public policy, and presented to the community as a means of a higher goal - is the most obscene and decadent phenomenon of any civilization.”
– Clare Booth Luce
[Today's posting removed the magnitude our yearly killing from this page.]
Tags: Lent