Easter Miracle for Severely Abused Dogs in Spain

Article by Vivienne Wharton - I woke up to my birthday without much excitement, but more trepidation as certain events were due to happen and I was feeling worried. A few days before, we had heard about two dogs, abandoned by their hunter owner and condemned to starve. He simply didn’t want them anymore, they were surplus to requirements and he just didn’t care. This is not unusual in Spain and especially after the hunting season, when there are many dogs needing rescuing.



The younger generation in Spain seems to have more empathy towards the plight of these animals and this man’s goddaughter had heard about our association and she asked for help and advice. We don’t often come into contact with the type of person like this girl’s godfather; they are usually long gone by the time their dogs are rescued, if the dogs are lucky enough to still be alive.

The owners are often brutal and vicious men, without conscience of what they do to their dogs and have been known to retaliate towards anyone who challenges them about their behavior, or reports them. So it was shocking that when the dogs arrived at my village and to my gate, the shameless owner was in tow. I had to let them come for me, as my car had been loaned out for the day. If only I had known!

Under Angry Breath, I Remained Calm

‘Four hundred euros,’ I asked for, under an angry breath. Did he think in this terrible economic crisis, that he can dump dogs on us, a charity and leave us to pay for the dogs’ board, their sterilization and the poor thin and sick looking creature’s vet’s bills, now that he had discarded them? We are not even a rescue charity, but an association trying to make changes for the animals in Spain. However, we were determined to prosecute and the only way, is to try to save the dogs first. The danger with reporting abuse to the police first is that they could confiscate them to the pound and they would probably die anyway.



He was scary and I was nervous, but for the dogs’ sake and his poor goddaughter, I remained calm. In the car, I was unwittingly sitting next to a Galguero (a Spanish hunter) that uses dogs for hunting. In general, they have a reputation for the most unbelievable cruelty and murder of thousands of hunting dogs at the end of each season. Dogs are hanged, with their back legs just touching the ground; it is a slow and painful deaths for these beautiful dogs that have done nothing other than serve their masters. The Spanish government still insists on ignoring the truth of this, whilst us rescuers, associations and many people protest and beg for it to end. Hardly anyone knows what goes on, or to what extent and how bad it is.

My Heart was Beating Out of My Chest….

There I was, sitting next to this man, my skin crawling with a feeling of intense hatred and my whole being filled with all of the anger I felt towards every galguero whose dog I have seen dead, mutilated, or suffering. What was I to do? My mind was running wild, but I had to respect the poor girl who had persuaded her godfather to give up these two poor souls.



When we got out of the car, the dogs were in a trailer, behind the car, enclosed inside and transported like pieces of equipment, the typical way of transporting these dogs. The dogs looked terrible! I was upset to the core but held my tongue whilst my heart beat out of my chest.

We took the dogs and they just left me there stranded. The dog’s former owner told his goddaughter it would have been less trouble for him to shoot the dogs.

The dogs are safe in residency now. They need care, which they are receiving and when they arrived, they were covered with ticks, fleas and parasites and were extremely thirsty and hungry.

They drank literally buckets of water and were so sad and scared. Today they are looking better and they are happier.

Thank you to all those that have donated so far and especially to the Harmony Fund for their help and support to ACTIN Association.

See more photos from ACTIN’s recent dog rescue blitz here.


Article By Vivienne Wharton of ACTIN in Spain - Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/rescuer-faces-fear-to-bring-dogs-an-easter-miracle.html#ixzz2P1IxDUrd

A tiny lamb separated from its mother struggles to be reunited.

Here we have a photograph showing a baby and mother desperate to be reunited. The tiny lamb struggles to climb up and jump over the barrier that separates her from her loving, distraught mother. Both mother and baby are being shipped to the slaughterhouse. No one gets out of there alive. In a civilized world, with so many options for a healthy, delicious diet, does this horrific treatment of animals have to continue?

CCTV for ALL Slaughterhouses36 minutes ago

There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to other animals as well as humans, it is all a sham. ~ Anna Sewell Photo Credit: Getty Images (m)

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Spectacular Hobbit Clip with heavy metal music! Wow!

Perfect combination of visual imagery and imposing music. If you haven't seen "The Hobbit", it is due for release on DVD on the 19th March.

New home for Mama Abut - Orangutan Diary - BBC (video)

Orangutans are being killed brutally every single day in order to claim land for palm oil production. Orangutans face extinction due to our shopping habits. You can help by choosing your products carefully. Orangutans are also being killed for the wild-life pet trade, mothers killed in order to steal their cute baby orangutans which end up horrible circumstances and certain death. Add your voice to help protect the Orangutan.

See Rescued Research Chimps Living a Happy New Life (video)

Liberated Research Chimps See the Sky for the First Time by Steve Williams
Chimp Haven, the sanctuary for retired biomedical research chimps, has released a moving video that shows government research chimps as they go out into the simulated wild for the very first time.

As noted above, more than 100 government-owned chimpanzees at the New Iberia Research Center, a laboratory in Louisiana, will be retired to the federal chimpanzee sanctuary Chimp Haven, providing sufficient funds are in place to construct the necessary facilities. It is estimated that this will cost upwards of $2.3 million, funds the government will not be able to provide in their entirety due to its spending cap having been reached.


Many of the chimps, some of them now over 50 years of age, will have endured a life-time being subjected to oftentimes invasive medical tests.

The process toward liberating chimpanzees from biomedical research facilities has been a long one.

In 2011, the Institute of Medicine issued a report in which it concluded the majority of research conducted on chimpanzees is unnecessary. After a period of consultation, it was recommended that all but 50 chimpanzees be fully retired.

As previously cited here at Care2, it emerged last year that a number of chimps from the New Iberia Research Center were in fact due to be sent to other medical facilities where, while they would no longer be subject to invasive medical tests, they may have still been used in research.

In December, however, and after a public outcry, the NIH announced it would move all the chimps to a sanctuary.

It is estimated that there are nearly 2,000 chimpanzees in the United States today. Of those, figures suggest 962 are still housed in research laboratories.

Of the remaining number, approximately 446 live in accredited sanctuaries; 259 are registered by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums; and 287 are either in non-accredited sanctuaries or zoos, or are being sold or housed as pets by members of the public — often in wildly restrictive and unsuitable environments.

Over the next 12 to 15 months, more lab chimps from across the country will be liberated from their lives as medical research animals.

As noted above, even though the government has now moved to retire the vast majority of the remaining chimps, a failure to provide funds for such rehousing efforts means that many so-called retirement sanctuaries, like Chimp Haven, have had to resort to asking for public funding. Experts in the field have called on the government to allocate more funds in order to ensure that the order to retire is more than just empty words.

The Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act of 2011, which requires the phasing-out of federally supported invasive research on Great Apes and for retiring government-owned animals to be sent to sanctuaries, continues to languish in Congress. Privately-funded invasive research on chimps is still ongoing, and with little remedy yet in sight. Certainly, there is still a great deal of work to be done on this issue, but the above video shows in clear terms why the work must continue.

A website has been set-up to track what have been dubbed “The Last 1,000.” You can access that website here.

To sign a petition to help end experimentation on chimps click here.

More information about ridiculous research here.


Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/watch-liberated-research-chimps-see-the-sky-for-the-first-time.html#ixzz2NbNWHGnf

Mother Bear Kills Herself and Cub to Escape Bile Farming Horror

The horror and inhumanity of bear bile farming, led a mother bear to suffocate her baby, then kill herself, to free them both from the disgusting lifelong torture of this barbaric trade.

Mother Bear Kills Cub and Self to Escape Life of Bile "Milking" Article by Piper Hoffman (original post here.)
A mother killed her baby and herself to end the torture of life on a bear bile farm. She hugged her cub until it suffocated, then drove her own head into a wall.


Bear bile is prized in traditional Chinese medicine, and the demand for it has led to mass production. Bear farmers lock moon bears into “crush cages,” so small the bears can’t move. Then farmers puncture their gall bladders to siphon off their bile.

The resulting wound stays open because farmers force needles or shunts into it so often. It becomes “susceptible to infections and diseases which can cause the animals unbearable pain,” according to the Daily Mail. Also common are broken teeth from biting on the bars of cages, painful foot conditions and even malignant tumors.

This can go on for 20 years, until the bear stops producing bile and is killed. More than 12,000 bears are caged on bile farms.


What A Mother Bear Knows

Moon bears have large vocabularies and lots of smarts. They know what is going on.

This mother reacted immediately when her cub cried of distress because farmers were puncturing its gall bladder for the first time. She broke out of her own cage and into her cub’s cage and did the only thing she could to save her baby from suffering.

This story is heartbreaking, but it is also an illustration of moon bears’ intelligence. Consider what this bear had to understand to do what she did: that what the farmers were doing felt the same way to someone else as it did when they did it to her; that the farmers would keep on doing this to her baby again and again; and the nature of death — namely, that it would end everything.

Consider also the depth of her devotion to her cub: she broke out of her cage, which she must have been able to do before but never did — or else she had one of those moments of super-adrenaline that allow mothers to lift cars off their children; and after she hugged her baby to death, she killed herself. The Daily Mail says she killed herself to end her torture, but she could have done that before. I think that may have been part of it, but mostly she killed herself because she had killed her cub.

This moon bear isn’t the only mother trapped in a factory farm who has gone to extremes to protect her young. Veterinarian Holly Cheever tells the tale of a dairy cow she treated who had given birth four times, and had her newborn confiscated every time. The fifth time, out in pasture at night and without humans around (obviously this happened a while ago, before factory farming had adopted near-constant restraints), she had twins. This cow understood that the farmer knew she had been pregnant, that he was expecting a calf, and that he would take her calves away as he had all her previous babies. So she hatched a plan.

In the morning she brought one of her calves to the farmer, so that he would be satisfied. She hid the other calf in the woods at the edge of the pasture. “Every day and every night, she stayed with her baby — the first she had been able to nurture FINALLY — and her calf nursed her dry with gusto,” Cheever relates.

That gusto led to a glitch the poor mother had not anticipated. Her udder was empty every time the farmer tried to milk her. Eventually he figured things out, found the bull calf, and stole him away for a short, miserable life in a veal crate. His mother’s efforts may not have bought him that much time, but they did reveal how smart she was and how capable of love.

Moon Bears and Their Bile

CITES lists moon bears as one of the most critically endangered species in the world. Any trade in them or their parts is illegal. Estimates of their population vary; some estimate that in all of Asia there are only 16,000 moon bears in the wild.

Many experts, including some practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine, say that there are herbal or synthetic alternatives that have the same effects as bear bile and its active ingredient, ursodeoxycholic acid (UDCA).

Bile farmers are producing too much bile. The market is saturated. Rather than scale down their operations, they keep the bears caged and keep suctioning fluids out of live bears’ bellies, then sell the result in the form of non-therapeutic products like shampoo. Those non-medicinal products account for half of the bile farmers sell.

Please watch the above video from advocacy group Animals Asia for more information on the plight of moon bears.

The following video contains some disturbing images - Video credit: Animals Asia