March 2021 Newsletter

Posted on by NHARL in News

The March 2021 Newsletter for the New Hampshire Animal Rights Group is now available.

We hope that you enjoy this latest edition of our newsletter. We hit the ground running in 2021, beginning with our online vegan cooking demo series in January (a.k.a. “Veganuary”). Read all about this initiative and the other ways we are promoting animal-free eating and supporting local vegan businesses.

We have also expanded some of our most successful ongoing programs, including our free No Hunting signs and Living with Beavers grant program.

Lastly, please note that 2021 is an election year for our board of directors. Be on the look-out for the nomination ballots in the coming months. If you’ve been thinking about how you could get more involved helping animals, consider joining our board!

Letter to the Editor: Here’s hoping pandemic kills the fur business

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Letter to the Editor
Union Leader
December 2, 2020

Here’s hoping pandemic kills off the fur business

It has been a difficult year for businesses, but one business that should fail is the fur business. Noted for its cruelty, it is a business we can do without. It is certainly a business a fur-bearing animal can do without. Whether being intensively confined on a fur farm and anally electrocuted or caught in a body-gripping trap and bashed in the head until dead, the animals will rejoice at the end of these cruel industries if they could. Many of us will rejoice with them and for them.

Fur-free Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, when animal rights activists take to the streets to protest fur will not happen in many areas this year. In NH, the protest that targets trapping has been canceled.

Trappers are an uncaring bunch of people. If you are on social media, you have probably seen the pictures; the smiling trappers squatting just out of reach of the bloody pawed frightened animal. What kind of person thinks this is something to be proud enough of that he would pose for a picture while a living and breathing animal is suffering behind him?

Please keep the animals who suffer and die for fur in your thoughts when you begin to shop. Many retailers have stopped selling fur. If we refuse to buy it, the rest will follow. Be kind, you will never regret it.

LINDA DIONNE
Raymond

Opinion/Letter: Taking turkey’s life unnecessary

Posted on by NHARL in Articles & Letters

Letter to the Editor
Portsmouth Herald
November 19, 2020

To the Editor:

The New Hampshire Animal Rights League would like to respond to Alexander LaCasse’s article in the Portsmouth Herald featuring the Stratham farm where customers are invited to slaughter their own Thanksgiving turkey.

If, to paraphrase the author, the idea of killing your own Thanksgiving turkey is enough to make you consider becoming a vegetarian, we think you’re on the right track. No matter what words are used to describe the slaughter — whether one equates animals to crops and calls it a “harvest” or twists it into a religious ritual and calls it “spiritual” and “sacred” — in the end it is simply the unnecessary taking of a life.

We do acknowledge that the turkeys on the Stratham farm have a much better life and death than the vast majority raised for Thanksgiving (an estimated 45 million, for whom standard agricultural practice includes cutting off the beaks and toes of poults without anesthesia), but if the goal is improved animal welfare, not considering turkeys food would do far more to reduce animal suffering than seeking out a nicer way to kill one bird, once a year.

As a final point, backyard slaughterers employing the knife-braining technique, which is commonly used and imagined humane, should be aware that while this can immobilize the turkey, the bird may only be paralyzed, not unconscious, and thus fully experiencing its death despite being unable to move its muscles.

Members of the New Hampshire Animal Rights League will be celebrating the Thanksgiving holiday with delicious vegan dishes that do not cause animal suffering. Check the freezer section of your grocery store for vegan holiday roasts. Why not make your “new Thanksgiving tradition” a meal that does not cause harm to animals.

James Glover, president
NH Animal Rights League, Inc.

Opinion/Letter: We need to love farm animals as we love our pets

Posted on by NHARL in Articles & Letters, NHARL News

Letter to the Editor
Portsmouth Herald
October 29, 2020

We need to love farm animals as we love our pets

This month, there were wonderful stories in this paper about Bob the injured seagull, Coconuts the lost cat, and Dr. Hunt’s book “Enjoy your Pets; don’t forget to give them a Hug”. The story about Bob the seagull was particularly poignant because most of us know how it feels to be close to an animal, look into their eyes, and pick them up and feel their bodies. It was the beginning of a love story for Alicia. She named the seagull and did all she could to comfort him and try to save his life. And there it is, the aha moment when we see an animal as an individual, a being capable of suffering and we want to protect them.

However, we don’t look into the eyes of the chickens, cows, lambs, and pigs whose bodies and milk products are displayed in huge quantities in our markets. We don’t see the male chicks and calves that are immediately killed because they are not needed as egg layers or milk producers. We don’t hear their cries, nor do we do the killing or the washing and dismembering.

Most people are completely unaware of the reality of what is happening to these animals. Don’t be fooled by the cheese package that shows a mother and her calf almost touching noses. It doesn’t happen. 99% of animal products come from large factory farms where there is unmitigated suffering for millions of animals who are bred into existence to satiate our immense and highly commercialized appetite for animal products. Speed and profit are the goals of factory farms and there is no room for humane treatment.

Speciesism is allowing one’s own interests and desires to override the interests of another species, even if that means the other species suffers. The most routine farming practices would be illegal if perpetrated against cats and dogs yet they have the same feelings and perceptions. I’ll leave it there for everyone to research further… but you need to know that every dollar we spend on animal products supports cruelty and suffering for many individuals that are just like Bob the seagull and Coconuts the cat.

CHERI BACH
Portsmouth

 

November 2020 Newsletter

Posted on by NHARL in NHARL News

The November 2020 Newsletter for the New Hampshire Animal Rights Group is now available.

We hope that you enjoy this expanded holiday edition. Join us for some exciting upcoming events, including our first ever virtual annual meeting on November 21st and online cooking demo with Carrie from Joyfull Eats!

Learn about our ongoing programs like our matching beaver grant and recently added “Send Someone a Compassion Pack.”

Don’t forget to check out the Vegan Holiday Table on the last page!

Letter to the Postmaster General

Posted on by NHARL in Articles & Letters, NHARL News

This letter was sent in response to an action alert from United Poultry Concerns (Shipping Baby Chicks Through the Mail is Inhumane and Should Be Stopped).

NHARL-logo-rect

October 28, 2020

The Honorable Louis DeJoy
Postmaster General
United States Postal Service
475 L’Enfant Plaza West, SW
Washington, DC 20260

Dear Mr. DeJoy:

With the media reporting on the deaths of thousands of newborn chicks as a result of delays and other issues affecting the United States Postal Service, our organization has heard from a number of people who were shocked to learn that living animals are regularly shipped around the country as if they were inanimate objects.

While incidents of entire shipments of chicks perishing have received public attention, what is still largely hidden from people is that newborn chicks dying in the custody of the United States Postal Service is a common, everyday occurrence.

Mailing chicks may have seemed like a good idea a hundred years ago, but it has grown into a large and callous industry that is out of step with the values of modern society. Shipping live animals through the Postal Service should be prohibited.

We respectfully urge you to review the custom of shipping baby chicks and other small animals with an eye toward ending this inherently cruel practice.

Sincerely,
James Glover, President

NH Animal Rights League, Inc.
P.O. Box 4211
Concord, New Hampshire 03302
nhanimalrights.org

In response, we received the following form letter from a USPS Customer Experience Specialist:

Op-Ed: The problems with bear hunting in NH

Posted on by NHARL in Articles & Letters, NHARL News

Published in the Union Leader on September 14, 2020 — IN CELEBRATION of the start of hunting season, Andy Schafermeyer devoted his September 6 “Adventures Afield” column to advertising different ways to hunt black bears. Bear hunting season in New Hampshire began Sept. 1.

Of the various bear hunting methods covered, perhaps the most egregious is hunting with trained dogs, or “hounding.” Hounding, which Andy describes as “sometimes controversial,” involves using packs of dogs to pursue bears until the exhausted animals either seek refuge in a tree or turn to fight the hounds. (Hounding is also dangerous for the dogs, who can be injured or killed.)

Andy states that most of these “treed” bears are released unharmed (presupposing that the stress of being pursued and potentially separated from dependent young causes no harm), because while the bear is trapped overhead, the hunter has time to “pause and observe.” “A sow, especially one with cubs, can be passed over,” he writes, in an apparent appeal to ethics. But self-restraint is optional. Although the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department discourages killing a mother with cubs, it is not illegal.

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Letter to the Editor: Time for a more humane squirrel hunting season

Posted on by NHARL in NHARL News

Letter to the Editor
Union Leader
August 25, 2020

Time for a more humane squirrel hunting season

New Hampshire Fish and Game is promoting the start of small game season on September 1st. That includes gray squirrels. What the department neglects to mention is that this is the time — as well for the second wave — of gray squirrel births this year.

Gray squirrel mothers are devoted and caring. If something happens to her, the babies will starve to death. Also, the babies can get fly larvae on them and the mother is not there to groom and keep that danger off. She is also not there to prevent other adult squirrels from entering the nest. When hunters kill mother squirrels, all of that happens. That is a fact.

I petitioned last year to change the date of the season to a later time so that the babies could at least fend for themselves if their mother was killed by hunters. I used the evidence of wildlife rehabbers saying they had dependent babies even coming to them still in October. The reply from Fish and Game was a flat denial and they cited some useless study from another state that was decades old.

I leave you with the words of a hunter that stopped hunting squirrels after an epiphany. He shot a squirrel’s head off, but the body was still there hanging on by the back legs and dangling. He shot the body again to get her down, looked at the squirrel on the ground and asked himself, “Now, why am I doing this?” Why indeed.

KRISTINA SNYDER
Chester

Our Turn: Management of state’s native fish needs reform

Posted on by NHARL in Articles & Letters, NHARL News

By LINDA DIONNE, JAMES GLOVER, JACK HURLEY and SHIMON SHUCHAT
For the Monitor — July 27, 2020

Aug. 1 is Respect for Fish Day, a national day of action to increase appreciation for fish as individuals and essential members of their aquatic ecosystem communities.

Over the past decade a large body of scientific evidence demonstrating that fish are sentient, cognitively complex animals has come forward, and according to the American Veterinary Medical Association fish “should be accorded the same considerations as terrestrial vertebrates in regard to relief from pain.”

Unfortunately, this scientific consensus isn’t reflected in public policy and the welfare and conservation of fish is often neglected. This problem is embodied in the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department’s management of our state’s wild fish populations, particularly its liberal hatchery stocking program and under-protection of native brook trout.

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