Reflections on Cape Charles and the Eastern Shore
These films explore chicken farming in America, and provide a brief history of the chicken industry and discussion of the adverse environmental impact of the industry on land, air, water, human/animal health and well-being. With Karen Davis, PhD, Founder and Director of United Poultry Concern.
Until All are Free is a film about the interconnection of all beings and our planet…It’s a film about justice, compassion and saving our world.
In this United Poultry Concerns podcast environmental activist and earth warrior Diana Oppenheim talks about her love for the Point Reyes National Seashore on the coast of Northern California and the fight for the fate of the tule elk who live there. Ranchers lease the public land to use for breeding, grazing, and killing cows for their “grass-fed” flesh and “local” dairy products. The ongoing tule elk conflict is a fight for resources, water, and the very lives of the sensitive elk species.
Diana founded the grassroots campaign forELK.org to help save the tule elk. She just completed a trip to Washington, D.C. to present over 100,000 petitions to Secretary Haaland at the Department of the Interior to end ranching in Point Reyes and stop the proposed killing of the endangered tule elk on public lands. Hope and Diana discuss the issue with the elk as well as the larger environmental impacts of regenerative animal agriculture and the problems with local, grass-fed animal products.
United Poultry Concern’s Second Annual Humane Hoax Chicken Webinar finished on May 29, 2021. UPC uncovered the rich, complex lives of chickens, and the pervasive, harmful lies of the chicken industry. Expert speakers brought a unique perspective that was well researched, interesting, and inspiring.
Below are videos from the webinar:
Hope Bohanec and Justin Van Kleeck
Exposing the Humane Hoax in the Chicken Industry
Dr. Tushar Mehta, Plant Based Data
The Ecological, Health, and Zoonotic Risks of Poultry and Egg Consumption
Rachel McCrystal, Woodstock Sanctuary
Speaking of Chickens
Quincy Markowitz & Rebecca Moore
Panel: Chickens on the Couch, Dismantling Who Is a Companion Animal
United Poultry Concerns is a nonprofit organization that promotes the compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl.
www.UPC-online.org
A Newsweek article published April 28 about a current dearth of commercial chicken “wings” concludes the marketing account with the perspective of UPC’s President, Karen Davis in the following three paragraphs:
The demand for U.S. chicken abroad increases production at home, production which Karen Davis, president of United Poultry Concerns, said devastates its surrounding environment. In the United States, 8 billion chickens are consumed each year, and American chickens produce nearly 86 million tons of manure a year.
Davis says this manure does not just create toxic environments for the chickens, but it also presents major disposal problems. While some can be used for fertilizer, much ends up in runoff. According to a report by Environmental Integrity Project, the chicken industry contributes about 12 million pounds of nitrogen to the Chesapeake Bay each year. Today, 82% of the bay is partially or fully impaired by toxic contaminants, the Chesapeake Bay Program found.
“The environmental issue is very important, because the plight of the chickens again spills out into the larger environment,” Davis told Newsweek. “One of the effects of the chicken industry is the destruction of wildlife and wildlife habitat. It just ruins every place it opens for business.”
According to the Microsanctuary Resource Center, while the microsanctuary model in many ways focuses on typically farmed species, any vegan home can be a microsanctuary when caring for animals who aren’t usually seen as “companions”: chickens, pigs, fishes, mice, rats, rabbits, insects, and more.
A microsanctuary can be as small as one rescued individual.
A microsanctuary starts from the premise that our space and our resources, no matter how limited, often are still sufficient for us to provide sanctuary to individual animals RIGHT NOW in order to prevent them from ever again being used as commodities. Additionally, microsanctuaries aren’t to be seen as stepping stones to larger sanctuaries but ends unto themselves: providing the best care to microsanctuary residents is a worthy goal, and the pressure to get bigger should always come second to sustainability and some degree of self-reliance. (In other words, beware of fundraising… Relying on outside funds to take in and care for MORE animals will always be in some degree of tension with doing what you can with what you have.
United Poultry Concerns in Machipongo has been featuring microsanctuaries in their podcasts. The latest Microsanctuary podcast is on Sweet Peeps Sanctuary in Alabama. Founder Tracey Glover shares how each of the chickens in her care have individual personalities and how she has learned that chickens are incredibly social, gentle, curious, and smart. The Microsanctuary Series will feature a different small sanctuary once a month through the summer of 2021.
The FBI announced on Tuesday that NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace was not the victim of a hate crime and that a door pull rope fashioned like a noose which was found in his garage at Talladega Superspeedway had been there since as early as October last year. NASCAR president Steve Phelps said, “this is the best result we could hope for,” adding that NASCAR would continue its investigation as to why the rope was fashioned into a noose. The incident comes less than two weeks after the organization banned display of the Confederate flag at all racing events.
Maybe, just maybe somebody knew what they were doing and used a bowline knot, which is superior to almost any other type of pull device on the market?
Following last February’s shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, some students claimed local government officials were at fault for failing to provide protection to students. The students filed suit, naming six defendants, including the Broward school district and the Broward Sheriff’s Office, as well as school deputy Scot Peterson and campus monitor Andrew Medina.
U.S. District Judge Beth Bloom dismissed a suit filed by 15 students who claimed they were traumatized by the Parkland High School shooting. Students argued that authorities’ failure to prevent the shooting violated their 14th Amendment rights to due process. The students had sued Broward County, the sheriff, the school superintendent and a school resource officer last summer in connection with the February shooting in Parkland, alleging they failed to protect them.
The suit named six defendants, including the Broward school district and the Broward Sheriff’s Office, as well as school deputy Scot Peterson and campus monitor Andrew Medina. Bloom ruled that the two agencies had no constitutional duty to protect students who were not in custody.
This decision adds to a growing body of case law establishing that government agencies — including police agencies — have no duty to provide protection to citizens in general:
“Neither the Constitution, nor state law, impose a general duty upon police officers or other governmental officials to protect individual persons from harm — even when they know the harm will occur,” said Darren L. Hutchinson, a professor and associate dean at the University of Florida School of Law. “Police can watch someone attack you, refuse to intervene and not violate the Constitution.”
The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the government has only a duty to protect persons who are “in custody,” he pointed out.
Moreover, even though the state of Florida has compulsory schooling laws, the students themselves are not “in custody”:
“Courts have rejected the argument that students are in custody of school officials while they are on campus,” Mr. Hutchinson said. “Custody is narrowly confined to situations where a person loses his or her freedom to move freely and seek assistance on their own — such as prisons, jails, or mental institutions.”
So, if the police are not required to protect the public, then who is?
It would seem personal safety is, according to this ruling, a personal thing, however, this seems to run counter the current climate of anti-second amendment rights…
“The Federal Bureaucracy, the deep state, could increasingly focus on gun owners in the coming years. The number of Americans who are violating firearm laws and regulations is increasing by tens or hundreds of thousands almost every year. This is not the result of a violent crime wave, but because politicians are continually criminalizing the possession of items that were previously legally owned.” — James Bovard
Is the illegality of gun ownership and right to self defense a possibility?
An example, the Connecticut legislature decreed that all owners of so-called “assault weapons” (which included any semi-automatic rifle with a pistol grip) must register their firearms. Perhaps as few as 15 percent of gun owners bothered to comply with the new law—meaning that Connecticut had up to 100,000 “criminals” living within its border. A 2016 Albany Times Union editorial also noted that 96 percent of roughly 1 million New Yorkers who owned so-called “assault weapons” failed to comply with registration requirements. California gun bans have been met with similar non-compliance. Typically, local governments have begun jumping on the bandwagon. Deerfield, Ill., recently decreed a $1,000-a-day penalty on anyone who fails to surrender or disable their semi-automatic firearms.
As government agencies — not Congress— are able to directly access databases that relate to gun ownership, the agencies themselves are often in a position to abuse this information. These databases are under the control of bureaucracies like the FBI that face little to no accountability from voters.
The National Instant Background Check System (NICS) is the background check system for firearms purchases and was a part of the 1994 Brady Act. Any gun owner that wants to buy a gun from a federally licensed firearms dealer (FFL), must go through a background check. Under this system, the FBI looks at certain factors such as criminal history and mental health to determine if an individual presents too much of a risk to own a firearm.
Although NICS is marketed as a speedy background check system, it comes with its own set of problems. NICS has gained notoriety for producing false positives, where law-abiding citizens are mixed and matched with criminals who have the same name.
Some estimates from the Crime Prevention Research Center indicate that in 2009 alone, 93 percent of initial NICS denials were false positives.
NICS has remained intact even when evidence has shown that it is ineffective in combatting crime. Note: crime rates had already gone into steep decline by the mid-1990s, well before NICS went into effect in 1998.
Bovard thus raises an interesting concern: “While such laws were made by elected officials, it is unelected bureaucrats who are largely left in charge of enforcement, and that can cause big problems for gun owners”.
Exercising control over this sort of legal abuse can be exceptionally difficult when dealing with unelected bureaucrats.
Citizens can vote out anti-gun politicians, but it is much more difficult to curb bureaucratic overreach. In some cases it may require abolishing or defunding of a government bureaucracy…so it goes.
On October 17th, the Alliance to End Chickens as Kaporos v. New York City Police Department presented oral arguments to the New York State’s highest court, the Court of Appeals.
The case concerns an ultraorthodox Jewish custom known as Kaporos, meaning “substitution” or “atonements,” in which thousands of chickens are forced to suffer and die for the sins of practitioners who pay to have the birds swung over their heads and then slaughtered illegally on city streets aided by the New York City Police Department, which even provides filthy traffic cones to be used as bleedout cones by the practitioners to enact their violation of 15 city and state health and animal cruelty laws.
After commencing this litigation in the state’s lower court in 2015, and then progressing to the Appellate Division, our case now lies in the Court of Appeals, following the oral argument presented to the Court by our attorney, Nora Constance Marino, on October 17th. Our attorney advises us that we can expect a decision in 40 to 90 days. Several outcomes are possible – the case could get affirmed, meaning the lower court’s decision to dismiss the case will stand. The case could get remanded – in which case, the lower court’s decision to dismiss the case will be reversed and we will head back to the lower court for further proceedings. Or, best case scenario, the Court of Appeals can grant the relief. Our attorney will keep us posted, and we will keep you posted.
Image courtesy of Their Turn
In the late 70’s the architect Michael Reynolds moved from Cleveland to the Taos mesa to race motocross. As a freaked-out hippie type, he was prone to rebellion and eschewing the standards of his formal education. While on his brief journey towards racing fame he began to integrate the then-novel concept of recycling into a building technique, using omnipresent mountains of empty pull-tab beer cans to construct bricks, and then shelter. A series of impressive innovations brought him a good spurt of publicity in the early days: magazines from National Geographic to Architectural Record came to the Mesa to see what was going on in the emerging field of living amongst garbage.
Reynolds describes a moment when he was living off the land in a primitive can hut on the mesa, eating grasshoppers and generating his own electricity outside of society. The orthopteran buffet and bucket commode suited his needs perfectly, but he knew his concepts required a more palatable iteration to truly evolve his notions of resource management and comfortable self-reliance. The simple hut gave way to a lifetime of experimental architecture that revolved around the motto of sustainable autonomy for everyone.
But, top of the line models are not cheap. Expensive, luxurious (by Earthship standards), and more-traditional home that meets most building codes called the Global Model. With a construction cost around $225 per square foot, or $300,000 for a one-bedroom, one-bath home, it’s certainly not for people who don’t believe wholeheartedly in the concept. But for those with the money to spend, it is the most holistic home available today: a home that heats, cools, feeds, and treats the sewage of its inhabitants, completely independent of any infrastructure. No heat, no HVAC needed.
The Global Earthship design performs in almost any climate around the world. The main features of this design include a double layer of glass (“double greenhouse”) between the inner living spaces and the outside and the use of underground cooling tubes and convection skylights which work together to provide ventilation and natural air conditioning for the building.
The Simple Survival Earthship is designed to provide comfortable shelter, clean water, contained sewage and basic solar power for lights and charging small electronics at a very low price. This building uses simple systems developed for the earthquake-relief demonstration project in Haiti. The Simple Survival Earthship may be built with one or more rooms and has evolved to include Vaulted Concrete and Wood Roof options. The concept has been applied to numerous disaster-relief and humanitarian builds around the world. For those inspired to build their own, Earthship Biotecture offers a Simple Survival app with Earthship construction drawings, materials lists, photos and more.
The Alliance to End Chickens as Kaporos is a project of Machipongo’s United Poultry Concerns. Formed in New York City in June 2010, the Alliance is an association of groups and individuals who seek to replace the use of chickens in Kaporos ceremonies with money or other non-animal symbols of atonement. The Alliance does not oppose Kaporos per se, only the cruel and unnecessary use of chickens in the ceremony.
NEW YORK, September 14, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ – On September 17, 2018, hundreds of activists from the Northeast and Canada will stage a Mass Vigil where brutal slaughter is performed in residential streets as part of an “atonement” ritual known as Kaporos. Under Section 356 of the Agriculture and Markets law, individuals may intervene if an animal is deprived of food and water for 12 hours or more while confined. During this Vigil, activists will exercise their right to provide water and food to thousands of suffering 6-weeks-old chickens. 60,000 chickens are crammed for days in plastic crates prior to the Kaporos ritual, which includes merciless swinging by their delicate wings. Such handling causes broken bones and torn ligaments as they scream in pain.
The ritual culminates in throat cutting at illegally rigged-up slaughter stations, where children stuff the wounded birds into filthy traffic cones to bleed to death slowly in pain and terror. 15+ laws are broken, more than half of which are health codes, posing a significant public health risk (see the toxicology report), yet the NYPD aids this ritual thanks to Mayor de Blasio’s craven desire to curry favor with this powerful voting bloc of the Orthodox Jewish Community. His administration has come under fire lately for failing to enforce laws mandating a secular education for the children of these very same communities that are breaking the law with impunity.
WHO: The Alliance to End Chickens as Kaporos, Jewish Veg, and The Save Movement – including Anita Krajnc, whose infamous arrest for providing water to a thirsty pig en route to slaughter was covered by news outlets internationally during the so-called “Pig Trial.”
WHEN: September 17th, Monday, 6:30pm
WHERE: Kingston and Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights, Brooklyn
WHY: Activists are holding this Mass Vigil and providing care to these mistreated birds as an act of civic duty and compassion for the birds who have been crated for days in the streets without food or water, and to expose Mayor de Blasio’s deference to politics over the public interest.