Vegan Studio: Actor, Actress, Model, Designer, Writer
Vegan Sudesh: We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give
As Sir Winston Churchill
puts it – “We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what
we give.” By volunteering with us, you not only benefit lives of many families in a #vegan
way, but also your own as well. It’s time to invest in your future as
well. There is no better time to invest in your future than now. So what
are you waiting for, simply email your resume to: vegan@sudesh.org to join us in any way you feel you can help Vegan Sudesh to reach it's goal to make the future a brighter one.
A will to change is all you need. Some of the ways are outlined below.
=> Spread the word: tell your friends about us, share about us on social media.
=> Volunteer: your skill and time is invaluable to us. You can share it with our social platform.
=> Media: truly your pen is mightier than the sword! If you belong to the media profession, help us further our cause by writing about us.
WhatsApp Group Link: Vegan Fashion Broadcast
WhatsApp Group Link: Vegan Fashion Broadcast
To join, DM at any of our socialmedia page
or
Email your whatsapp no to:
vegan@sudesh.org
or
Email your whatsapp no to:
vegan@sudesh.org
Vegan Models, Fashion & Activism
We should highlight some of the sexier things in the vegan
world. There are many perks to eating a more plant
based diet but one of the best is the radiant physical beauty.
instagr.am/vegan.model page is about our multimedia project promoting veganism by exposing vegan beauty, strength and diversity.
This is a project by Vegan Sudesh.
Our team is set out to do photoshoots with vegan men and women to really show
the aesthetic side of the lifestyle.
instagr.am/vegan.model page is about our multimedia project promoting veganism by exposing vegan beauty, strength and diversity.
The Giza Zoo is a National Disgrace
The Giza Zoo is a national disgrace
Egyptian animal welfare societies and activists are calling for a protest this Saturday outside the Cairo Zoo in Giza. According to animal rights activists Egypt has become a hub for international illegal trade in wildlife. We've reported earlier about the horses in Egypt (horses are the silent victims of Egypt's revolution), and the dolphins being kept as "pets" in a Sinai swimming pool, and now the Egyptian Society for Mercy to Animals (ESMA) and other groups and individuals are organizing to give a voice to those who can't speak.
According to Mona Khalil, ESMA co-founder,"The way Egypt treats animals is a shame. The Giza zoo is a national disgrace, Egypt has become known as a hub of the international illegal trade in wildlife, and the municipal policy of controlling street animal populations by shooting and poisoning is deplorable.
"Pet breeding and pet shops are part of an unregulated and illegitimate industry in which humans exploit animals for commercial gain, yet do not pay taxes or benefit the Egyptian economy.
"At the root of all this is a not only systemic corruption but also policy failure, as Egypt is lacking even the basic animal welfare legislation that would enable the prosecution of violators. Some will say that now is not the time to ask for animal's rights, when human rights are still being violated. But actually there is no better time, as Egypt is trying to build a more just and humane society for all its inhabitants."
What the animal activists demand
The protestors will have demands. First they will demand an investigation into corruption in the Ministry of Agriculture's General Organization for Veterinary Services and mismanagement of the Giza Zoo. They will also call for an investigation into the corruption in the Ministry of Agriculture staff and vets at Egypt's ports and airports.
They will demand that the new Egyptian government stop the widespread practice of shooting and poisoning street animals to reduce their population, calling for the adoption of more humane population control policies such as Trap-Neuter-Vaccinate-Release, which has been successfully implemented in other developing countries such as India.
In addition, protestors are demanding that the pet breeding and pet shops industries be regulated and forced to adhere to a guideline for basic animal welfare standards, including proper humane treatment and veterinary care of breeding animals, and acceptable housing conditions.
Finally, they will also ask for more humane standards for the slaughtering of livestock.
Without laws being passed, there are no legal consequences for animal cruelty and mistreatment, so animal welfare policy and legislation are critical, the organizers say.
Subscribe to skf Animal Rights Newsletter for FREE by simply writing to: Animal.Rights@sudeshkumar.org
Egypt
skf Animal Rights Campaign
Website: http://eg.sudeshkumar.org
Human Rights of Domination & Abuse
Human Rights of Domination & Abuse?
*PURPOSE: The purpose of this essay is to present the truth about modern industrialized factory farming – A human system of domination, abuse & the genocide of animals. We humans often gather to party & celebrate; we raise & clink our glasses & we say: Cheers! Then we spear pieces of meat with our forks & we fill our bellies with the pain & suffering of farm animals. Please come & follow me as I now take on the identity of a Baby calf for this essay.
*The SUN: I have never seen the Sun with it's white rays of light that shine down to the Earth.. I have never heard the birds sing in the morning that greet the new day. I have never seen the wind blow gently through a field of wild grasses. I have never looked out at a vast landscape in the distance. & I have never looked up to see the eternal blue sky. Where is the sun? Where is the beautiful sun? I want to be intimate with the Sun, the wind & the sky. But, I will never see this Sun that I so deeply yearn for.
*MY BIRTHDAY: I am a Baby calf. I was born on an industrialized factory farm in August 2010. It was a noisy day at the farm. My mother gave birth to me & I fell to the cold cement ground here in this concrete building. My mother licked me & I felt her gentle touch. I nursed with her & slept near her for only a precious few days. Then an angry Homo Sapien man with a rope & a stick beat me & lead me to my new home: A cage. I struggled with this human & I cried to my mother. I did not want to leave her. I remember seeing my sad mother fade away in the distance as I was taken away. I never saw my mother again.
*MILK, YOGURT & CHEESE: I was born so that humans can eat dairy products such as Milk, cheese, butter & yogurt. My mother will go off now to give her cow's milk to humans – rather than to me. I am only a byproduct of the dairy industry. I will be slaughtered for veal, baby calves liver, leather shoes & leather coats.
*CAGES: Now I am here alone in this small cage, in a fluorescent lit, cold cement building with ammonia fumes & desperate animal sounds. I am fed unpleasant food. I am injected with antibiotics & hormones to plump me up for slaughter. I can not move around. I want to run & jump as all baby animals do. I want to run in a meadow & see the wild flowers & hear the sparrows sing. But, here I am in this alienating, existential & lonely Homo Sapien industrialized factory farm.
*CRAZY: Some of the other baby calves are going crazy. One of them bites at the cage & rocks back & forth all day. Another baby calf hits his head against the cage & kicks the walls trying to escape. & Another calf just lays there all day staring out into space.
*HOMO SAPIENS: The humans who work here are emotionally disturbed people.
*George: There's George who hates animals; He swears at the animals & he beats them; He has a rage deep down in his soul; He was abused as a child; Now as an adult he likes the power & control he has over animals; He enjoys getting revenge on animals for all the shame & humiliation he endured as a child.
*Larry: Then, there's Larry who is part of the human conspiracy against animals; Larry says that God told man to dominate, conquer & exploit animals for human use; Larry doesn't care whether animals feel pain or fear; Larry has turned his brain off in order to kill & eat animals; Larry in turn teaches his children the party line -- that it's okay to harm animals for human use.
*VEAL MEAT, BABY CALVES LIVER & LEATHER COATS & SHOES: A Restaurant, a Grocery store & a Clothing store put in an order for: Veal meat, Baby Calves liver & a Leather coat & Leather shoes – on a Monday. So my farmer calls in a work order for a transport truck on Tuesday & slaughter time on Wednesday. On Thursday I will be the special entrées of the day: Veal with wine & Baby calves liver with onions. On Friday I will be hung on a rack as a leather coat & on display as leather shoes for sale.
*SLAUGHTER: It is February 2011. I am now 6 months old & it is time for me to be slaughtered. I am anemic & weak; I am covered in sores & my spirit is broken. A frowning human comes to take me away this day; He uses a pitch fork to prod me out of the building onto the truck. I stumble into the back of the truck, pushed by other baby calves. When the truck is full, we travel off to the slaughter yard. It is a cold day & the wind blows & I shake. One of the sick baby calves falls to the floor of the truck & is stepped on by other calves; That baby calf dies there alone on that crowded truck: haemorrhaging out, with a broken hip -- while no one in the universe cares. When we arrive at the slaughter house I hear frightening sounds, the cries of the dying in the distance. We walk down a long dark path, in single file. I am so afraid. I have given up all hope. Now it is my turn to die. My life is about to end. Good-bye mother, good-bye other baby calves, good-bye planet Earth. The human puts an electric bolt gun up to my forehead. I hear a loud zap. Electricity races through my head & body; I see lightning; My head & body burn; I stiffen, then I breathe my last breath & I fall to the Earth. & I die.
Mary Hamer
Animal Rights Advocacy Group
SUDESH KUMAR FOUNDATION
Halal: Cruelty by Islamic faith practitioner
If you are engaged in an act of cruelty, there is an easy, effective way to silence your critics and snatch some space to carry on. Tell us all that your religion requires you to do it, and you are "offended" by any critical response. Erect an electric wire fence around your nastiest actions and call it "respect".
There's a good example of this religious modus operandi playing out on a dinner table near you – and this week, we found out it is becoming more and more common. In Britain, it is a crime to kill a conscious cow or sheep or chicken for meat by slashing its throat without numbing it first. The reasons are obvious. If you don't numb an animal, it screams as you hack through its skin, muscle, trachea, oesophagus, carotid arteries, jugular veins and major nerve trunks, and then it remains conscious as it slowly drowns in its own blood – a process that can take up to six minutes. So we insist that an animal is stunned before its throat is slashed, to ensure it is deeply unconscious. There isn't much humanity in our factory farming system, but this is – at least – a tiny sliver of it, at the end.
But there is a loophole in the law. You are allowed to skip all this and slash the throats of un-numbed, screaming animals if you say God told you to. If you are Muslim, you call it "halal", and if you are Jewish you call it "kosher". Back in the Bronze Age, or the deserts of sixth-century Arabia, it was sensible to act this way. You needed to know your meat was fresh and the animal was not sick, so you made sure it was alive and alert when you killed it. As Woody Allen once said, it wasn't so much a commandment as "advice on how to eat out safely in Jerusalem". But we have much better ways of making sure meat is fresh and healthy now. Yet for many religious people it has hardened into a dogma, to be followed simply because it was laid down in their "holy" texts long ago by "God".
Of course, they claim that this practice isn't cruel at all. Henry Grunwald, chairman of the main body overseeing the certification of kosher meat, Shechita UK, says that when you slash an animal's throat "there is an instant drop in blood pressure in the brain. The animal is dead." Similarly, Raghib Ali, of the Oxford Islam and Muslim Awareness Project, says: "It's not cruel, it is better for the animal."
This has been proven by science to be false. The Farm Animal Welfare Council (FAWC) is the Government's senior panel of independent scientific experts on this area, and their investigation found that "the prevailing scientific consensus that slaughter without pre-stunning causes very significant pain and distress". The FAWC chairwoman, Dr Judy MacArthur Clark, explains: "To say [the animal] doesn't suffer is quite ridiculous."
To give just one example: after you cut a calf's throat, in 62 per cent of cases, large clots form at the back of its carotid arteries, which means blood pressure to the brain massively slows and the animal doesn't black out at all. It stays conscious as it bleeds to death from its throat in agony.
Kosher butchers never numb their animals. Most halal butchers now use some stunning, but the RSPCA warns that it is at a much lower dosage to guarantee the animal is still alive when it is killed – so it doesn't properly protect them from pain. The attempts by religious people to explain this away and claim it is in fact a kindness to the animal are a pseudo-science: the intelligent design of animal welfare. That's why making meat like this is a crime in countries from Spain to New Zealand, where an ethnically Jewish Prime Minister banned it this year.
Yet in Britain this kind of animal cruelty is becoming standard. Over the past few years, there has been a dramatic abandonment of the numbing of animals before killing them, in the name of "respect" for a religious minority. The BBC's You And Yours programme says that halal meat now "accounts for around a quarter of the UK's meat trade". It is served unlabelled and as standard meat in Wembley Stadium, Twickenham, on all British Airways flights, at Nando's, Subway, KFC, Pizza Hut, Domino's Pizza and even swanky Ascot racecourse. There has been a huge expansion, then, in the suffering of living creatures – and we are supposed to applaud it as an advance for tolerance.
The halal and kosher meat industries are fighting even tepid proposals by the European Union to ensure that all meat made from unstunned animals must be clearly labelled. They claim this will render their businesses "economically unviable". Isn't that an extraordinary confession – that if people knew what they were buying, the companies would go bust?
Atheists who criticise religion are constantly being told we have missed the point and religion is really about compassion and kindness. It is only a handful of extremists and fundamentalists who "misunderstand" faith and use it for cruel ends, we are told with a wagging finger. But here's an example where most members of a religion choose to do something pointlessly cruel, and even the moderates demand "respect" for their "views". Their faith makes them prioritise pleasing an invisible supernatural being over the screaming of actual living creatures. Doesn't this suggest that faith itself – the choice to believe something in the total absence of evidence – is a danger that can lead you up needlessly nasty paths?
Britain is famously a nation of animal lovers who turn doe-eyed and gooey at the sight of any furry creature. So why are we sitting silently while our treatment of many of our animals regresses to the standards of the sixth century?
It is true that, at the moment, there is a frightening rise in real bigotry against Muslims and, to a lesser but still significant extent, Jews. Some people who object to the rise of halal meat try to fit it into a preposterous narrative where Britain is somehow being "taken over" by the 4 per cent of its population who are Muslim, presumably via the Protocols of the Elders of Mecca. I have written many articles against this resurgent bigotry, and I can see why some people would be shy about anything that would look like piling on.
But the only consistent position is to oppose viciousness against these minorities, and to oppose viciousness by these minorities. The proponents of halal and kosher meat are choosing to inflict terrible and unnecessary pain on living creatures every day. It would be condescending to treat them as victim-children who are exempt from moral debate – and it would be a betrayal of the real victims here: the sentient creatures having their throats cut.
We need to be much more self-confident in criticising religious claims. Your ideas do not deserve any special status because you say they came from an invisible, supernatural being.
No, we don't respect your desire to needlessly torment animals because some hallucinating desert nomads did it centuries ago. We don't respect it at all. You can cry that we are "persecuting" you if we stop you committing acts of cruelty if you want.
It's what the religious – Christian, Jew and Muslim alike – did when we stopped you tormenting women and gays and anybody else you could get your hands on. One of the great markers of the advance of human kindness is the howls you will hear from the Men of God.
Sourced from: Friday, 19 November 2010 / Johann Hari / The Independent, UK
SUDESH KUMAR
Email: uk.cohort@sudeshkumar.org
