September 22nd, 2012 by Kezia

There are fewer households with pets, and fewer pets in U.S. homes, according to the latest AVMA numbers. Most attribute the decline to the economy. As most who work in pet rescue can attest, the number of pets given up in shelters is increasing as people face unemployment and foreclosure.

If this guy can keep his dog, so can you.

An “owner surrender” due to loss of one’s home elicits sympathy: someone facing hard times, presumably through no fault of their own, loses not only their house but their best friend. Rental units that allow animals are difficult to find – every time I see a real estate sign that says “for rent, no pets” I want to pelt it with eggs. (I don’t, because that wouldn’t be vegan.) The lack of available housing for people with pets is a serious issue in cities today. Civic action to compel more property owners to accept pets is very needed, particularly when so many people must downsize.

While this is a real problem, people who abandon their pets for housing reasons don’t get a free pass. (I was delighted to read this news story about a local pet-friendly homeless shelter.)

A decent person would rather live in a tent city, a car or a cardboard box with their pets than take them to a shelter where death is certain. These animals haven’t done anything wrong to justify being abandoned. People who throw their animals away like trash don’t deserve sympathy. There is no justification for indifference to the animals who love them and depend on them.

You cannot convince me that this person exhausted all options. There are dozens of alternatives, only one of which is to move to a place that accepts pets. Cats and small dogs are easy to sneak in and out of a building.

Rather than sentencing a pet to death, they could have placed them with a friend, family member, coworker, or neighbor – at least then they could continue to visit their pet. They could have found them a new home with a kind stranger through an ad. They could have contacted a rescue organization or even a sanctuary. They could have put them temporarily in a foster home or even a kennel until they found more suitable housing.

There are times when the care of a pet becomes too expensive for people with shrinking means, and in this specific circumstance, it can be better for the animal to live elsewhere rather than suffer hunger or neglect. However, these are not the financial hardships we’ve heard lately. (Putting two kids through college is not cause to abandon your dog, but it is cause to insist your brats get part-time jobs in the dining commons.) As with housing, a decent person would give up satellite television before they’d give up a dog.

I am not sure why animal lovers seem to think playing the financial hardship or foreclosure card is an acceptable reason to abandon an animal. Is it sad? Yes, it’s sad – for the animal who is left in a cage to die alone, scared, and unwanted, with no idea what they’ve done to warrant it. But it’s not sad for the human who abandons them.

My thanks to Pets of the Homeless for the above photo, and for their important work.

animal rescue, companion animals

September 10th, 2012 by Gary Smith

Op-ed writer Nicholas Kristoff’s Sunday piece “Where Cows Are Happy and Food is Healthy” explains that there are farms across the United States where the farmers love their animals, where the farms still have souls, unlike those big, bad factory farms. His article, as well as books by Michael Pollan, Alice Waters, Nina Planck and others, all serve the same mythology, that humans can not only not feel bad about consuming the flesh of sentient beings and their secretions, but that it is somehow noble to do so. And, magically, all of the chronic diseases that have been associated with consuming animal products – heart disease, stroke, type II diabetes, some cancers, kidney and liver disease – are not associated with eating animals from these magical farms.

All of that is offensive in its own right, but if you actually pull some of the ideas/quotes from the article, it’s even more offensive.

As long as I’ve known him, Bob has had names for every one of his “girls,” as he calls his cows.

He names his slaves. There’s really nothing remarkable about that. Plantation owners named their slaves as well. Note the emphasis also on “his” girls and “his” cows, implying that they are not sentient beings but rather property owned by Bob. It’s amazing that Kristoff doesn’t make the connection between seeing the cows that are exploited on Bob’s farm as property. How can you have a relationship with property?

“I spend every day with these girls,” Bob explained. “I know most of my cows both by the head and by the udder. You learn to recognize them from both directions.”

This is plain creepy. He knows “his” cows so well from extracting their milk from their nipples that he can recognize them by their nipples. I get that this is supposed to be playful, but it illustrates how often he uses them for his gain. It’s as if he is saying that he exploits “his” cows so often, that he has an equal relationship with their udders as he does their face.

I asked about Jill, and Bob rattled off her specs. She is now producing about eight gallons a day, with particularly high protein and butterfat content. Jill’s mother was Jolly, a favorite of Bob’s. When Jolly grew old and unproductive, he traded her to a small family farm in exchange for a ham so she could live out her retirement with dignity.

If Bob cared deeply for “his” cows, how in the world does Kristoff explain him trading her for the flesh of a once sentient pig? If he had a relationship with Jill, how did Jill feel about being traded for a ham? I would feel certain that Jill would be upset by Bob trading her for flesh. What happens to his parents or his wife when they become old and unproductive? Maybe they get traded for a pair of leather shoes?

Many cows in America now live out their lives in huge dairy barns, eating grain and hay and pumping out milk. But evidence is growing that cows don’t do well when locked up, so now many dairies are reverting to the traditional approach of sending cows out to pasture on grass.

Who knew that sentient beings with complex inner lives and emotions don’t do well when locked up? I hope he doesn’t expect me to believe that humans incarcerated have healthy, balanced lives in prison. Of course, the cows that Bob exploited didn’t actually commit a crime to be sentenced to a life of exploitation. (Neither did a lot of people in prison.)

“For productivity, it’s important to have happy cows,” [Bob] said. “If a cow is at her maximum health and her maximum contentedness, she’s profitable. I don’t even really manage my farm so much from a fiscal standpoint as from a cow standpoint, because I know that, if I take care of those cows, the bottom line will take care of itself.”

This could easily read, “If I keep my slaves contented, they get way more work done on the cotton farm.” I wonder exactly how he calculates happiness in cows? His statement also draws us back to the fact that “his” cows are inventory. They are production units. It’s no different than any business that sells products, non-sentient products.

This isn’t to say that Bob’s farm is a charity hostel. When cows age and their milk production drops, farmers slaughter them. Bob has always found that part of dairying tough, so, increasingly, he uses the older cows to suckle steers. That way the geriatric cows bring in revenue to cover their expenses and their day of reckoning can be postponed — indefinitely, in the case of his favorite cows.

I’m glad we acknowledge that Bob and other farmers slaughter, i.e. murder “their” happy cows once they no longer are profitable. Kristoff seems to brush off this fact as if he turns in his old tractor for a new tractor. I also like that he plays god in that his favorite units of property aren’t murdered. If I were his son, I’d make sure I was his favorite!

I teased Bob about running a bovine retirement home, and he smiled unapologetically. “I feel good about it,” he said simply. “They support me as much as I support them, so it’s easy to get attached to them. I want to work hard for them because they’ve taken good care of me.”

By “supporting them,” does Bob mean feeding and keeping them alive? Thanks for the support, Bob. Please don’t trade me in for ham. Is that equal to “providing” him with gallons of milk for him to sell? As for taking good care of him, that’s an odd way of saying their being exploited against their wills has provided for him financially.

“You hate to have it go to legislation, but we need to protect the animals,” he said. “They’re living things, and you have to treat them right.”

How is he protecting “his” cows? By only murdering a percentage of his slaves? I’m glad that he acknowledges that they are living “things.” Not “unliving things” like tractors, hay, shoes. How does he treat them right, by exploiting them and using them as milking machines until they are less productive? Wonder how he’d feel about his children being supported like Bob supports “his” cows?

As Bob’s dairy shows, food need not come at the cost of animal or human health and welfare. We need not wince when we contemplate where our food comes from.

Animals are healthy being force-bred, confined, having their children and milk stolen for Bob’s wallet? Yes, you do need to wince. You are stealing the lives, the babies, and milk from sentient beings. You need to wince because all of us know that using individuals is wrong. There is no better or kinder way of exploiting others. Wince, my friend.

The next time you drink an Organic Valley glass of milk, it may have come from one of Bob’s cows. If so, you can bet it was a happy cow. And it has a name.

The fact that Kristoff uses the term “it” to describe the happy cow just about sums everything up. Neither Kristoff nor Bob have any respect for the sentience of those that they exploit for their pleasure. If they truly respected dairy cows, or chickens, turkeys, pigs, sheep and other animals used for food, they’d go vegan.

What is missing from this in-depth, fantasy piece is what happens to the calves who are born on Bob’s farm. Are the boys sold off to become veal? Does he keep the girls and exploit them when they reach the proper age to be force bred? Does he sell some of the female calves, the ones he doesn’t give a name to? How does he breed the dairy cows?

The only “humane farms” or “happy farms” are sanctuaries, such as Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary in New York, co-founded by Jenny Brown and her husband Doug Abel. They pick up after the likes of Bob and others. They rescue and care for hundreds of animals who are the refugees of this fantasy world of kinder exploitation. At WFAS, the animals do have names, and get to live out their lives in dignity. They are not asked to produce profits nor will they be traded for a ham when their lives have no financial meaning. As Brown’s new memoir “The Lucky Ones” makes clear, the “small,” “local,” “humane,” “family” farms are places of egregious cruelty, neglect, and indifference.

Some might find Kristoff’s article refreshing, believing that his farm is a step in the right direction, or that his farm is much better than a factory farm housing thousands of dairy cows. The problem is not in the size of the farm nor the treatment, the issue is using individuals in the first place. No cow deserves to have their lives and rights taken away from them so that another can profit and others can please their palates.

Articles like these are dangerous because they lull people into believing that if you buy your milk from a farm like Bob’s, your conscience is clear. It’s not. If you know enough to care about the treatment of animals used for food products, then you know enough to go vegan.

humane farms, New York Times, Nicholas Kristoff, veagn

March 27th, 2012 by Kezia

This cute infographic on calcium is making the vegan rounds lately. At first it seems like an innocuous way to address the “where do you get your calcium” question. Think about it further, and you can see the danger of presenting data like this.

Here’s the thing: 100 grams of raw chopped greens is about a cup and a half. That’s a lot to consume at one sitting. 100 grams of whole almonds is almost a full cup. 100 grams of parsley is about one and two-thirds cups. But 100 grams of liquid (such as milk) is only about a half cup, give or take.

Comparing a small volume of fluid to a large volume of plant foods is a losing game – if you want the plants to come out ahead.

(And don’t get me started on the charts that compare nutrients by calorie count; they’re even worse. You’ll be eating two and a half cups of raw kale to get to 100 calories.)

There is a problem looking at nutrition through a reductive process that defines and judges the merits of a food based on its individual nutrients. Milk does in fact contain a number of substances that bodies need in order to function. It is, after all, the ideal food for vulnerable mammal babies. Based solely on these individual nutrients, milk’s “nutritional profile” is overall pretty good, and a couple swallows of milk is an efficient way to deliver those nutrients. Yes, milk also contains many substances that are not nourishing, dangerous in high doses, and frankly disgusting. But if we’re merely looking at the “box scores,” as these infographics encourage us to do, milk would be considered a healthy food.

This seemingly anti-vegan rant helps illustrate why an ethical argument for veganism, not a health argument, works best. People will not be won over based on faulty or misleading nutritional claims (nor should they be). If they are, it won’t be for long. Nutritional science is still an evolving field of study. Research and evidence is scant, difficult to interpret, even contradictory.

Food processing is an evolving industry as well, so we may see a day when cow’s milk is engineered to provide the most calcium per gram of any substance the world has ever seen. The ethics, however, are bulletproof. Consuming milk is cruel and unjust. It is cow slavery. The end.

animal rights, diet, health, vegan

February 1st, 2012 by Gary Smith

Yesterday, a blogger wrote a piece about green smoothies. Her conclusion was that combining a couple of pieces of fresh fruit with handfuls of leafy greens in a blender is bad for you. Yes, that was her conclusion, and the conclusion of a couple of health gurus, based on specious science such as chewing those same foods would burn 100 calories.

Now, I don’t really care if you take that information and cease making green smoothies. What I do care about is when veganism moves away from ethics and towards some sort of dietary perfection. What I care about is the perception of veganism to the mainstream population. Whether we like it or not, vegan diets are perceived as extremely radical and restrictive, and that vegans only eat salad. When we ask the public to stop eating meat, dairy, eggs and honey, we are asking them to remove foods that have been part of the culture’s diet for thousands of years. We are asking them to go far outside the mainstream.

My concern with the cult of health is that its outspoken advocates are conflating a vegan diet with limited diets that abstain from all oils, sugars/sweeteners, salt, gluten, soy and/or other foods. The same goes for popular “vegan cleanse” products and protocols. At best the public is led to believe these foods are not vegan and cannot be eaten if they choose to try a vegan diet. At worst, it makes it appear like we truly only do eat salads – and makes us look a little crazy.

This is destructive to our goal of converting people to a vegan diet and lifestyle.

The cult of vegan health is very similar to what happened and continues to happen within the raw food community. Gurus emerge, disparage perfectly healthy foods, and confuse the public; raw foodists choose gurus and take sides, while the ethics of eating a vegan diet are lost. The no oil/sugar/salt crowd is getting louder and more strident about their dietary beliefs. It’s an ego- and vanity-driven “my diet is cleaner than yours” competition, and it ultimately hurts veganism.

As an ethical vegan, I don’t really care what you eat – as long as you aren’t eating meat, dairy, eggs and honey. If you want to eat soy and gluten meats, non-dairy milks, oil, vegan sugar and sweeteners, salt, baked goods, dog bless you. The goal is to create vegans and save animals, not create healthy eaters. The goal is to make a vegan diet and lifestyle more mainstream, attainable and practical, not bamboozle people into thinking that they need to achieve dietary perfection. Banning veggie burgers, agave syrup or green smoothies is certainly not helping animals any.

I happen to eat a very clean diet because I didn’t get the vegan superpowers that many claim to get by eating a vegan diet. This is fine, since I did it for ethics. I don’t write about what foods I omit from my diet because I see that as being harmful to my message, which is that it is unethical to eat and use individuals. Period. What vegan foods I eat or don’t eat is immaterial to that message.

Registered dietician and animal rights activist Ginny Kisch Messina wrote on her blog The Vegan RD, “Ten billion (land) animals live and die under the most horrible conditions imaginable in the United States every year. So obviously, our efforts should focus on getting people to consume less…olive oil?” For more of her wisdom on the flawed “health argument” for veganism, see our interview last year here.

So, please be cognizant in your outreach about what a vegan diet and lifestyle are, and if you wish to follow a guru or decide to eat a highly restrictive diet, keep it to yourself.

animal rights, diet, green smoothies, health, vegan

January 5th, 2012 by Kezia

Many vegans lament that there are dog/cat rescuers and other animal activists in their communities who are not vegan. I’m with you, believe me. I get it. It is shocking when humane societies serve animals on plates at fundraisers. It is a head-scratcher that someone who works to save whales would order sushi in a restaurant, failing to recognize he is destroying the ocean habitats and food chains that support those whales.

I understand your frustration that nonvegan companon animal rescuers don’t recognize that a pig is every bit as lovable as a dog, and a turkey can be just as cuddly as a cat. They work hard for one or a few species but not every species – just like there are people who feel called to get active on behalf of sea turtles, elephants, wolves, or other specific animals.

Although it would be wonderful if more dog/cat rescuers were vegan, I’d also like it if more vegans gave a crap, and actively helped animals in need. Not eating, wearing or exploiting animals is the absolute bare minimum a person can do. It is the default setting. It is the “moral baseline,” as some say.

Over the years I’ve worked with people and organizations who rescue dogs, cats, birds and other domestic pet species, those who are doing the dirty work of animal liberation. There should be much more respect, and less derision, for “dog and cat people” from the vegan community.

The animal rescuers I know do things that most vegans wouldn’t deign to do – such as run into traffic with a leash in one hand and a can of dog food in the other; wake up every two hours to bottle-feed kittens, crawl through mud to save a lost cat who scratches the hell out of them as a thank-you, cut the chain embedded in the neck of an auto yard pit bull who has never known a kindness from a human, pay their unemployed neighbor’s vet bill, not to mention clean up piles upon piles of shit.

Animal rescuers are willing to trap, trespass, surveil, steal, and otherwise do whatever it takes to do the right thing for an animal, right now, regardless of what the law says. As activists, most of us don’t hold a candle to these people. Too many vegans do very little to proactively help animals.

But what about the estimated 100 animals a year we save by being vegan? Let’s not strain ourselves patting each other on the back.

Going vegan doesn’t “save” 100 animals a year. 100 animals don’t go to sanctuaries or aquaria each year because you are vegan. In theory, you are preventing the future births of 100 animals a year. But with the realities of animal agribusiness, I’m loath to consider that anything more than theory. The minor losses the vegan population causes to animal processors are more than made up for by government subsidies and bailouts, plus exports to developing countries.

Ordering a pizza without cheese or buying cruelty-free makeup doesn’t make you a hero. Going to a potluck or a protest a few times a year is a nice opportunity to have your picture posted on Facebook so other people can congratulate you for changing the world. We should do those things. They feed us – literally and emotionally.

But there are no photo galleries for people who spend their entire weekend doing home checks to make sure that companion animals are being adopted by loving families instead of creeps. There are no awards for people who foster yet another animal because the “owners” are having a baby and don’t want him or her anymore, or people who go out night after night to trap homeless cats so they can be treated for mange, vaccinated, and fixed. They don’t get a prize for every box of starving abandoned kittens they find on the side of the road or every injured, bleeding dog they rush to a 24-hour vet. It is thankless, unglamorous work. It saves animals.

So be kind to dog and cat rescuers. Befriend one who isn’t vegan. Walk some dogs, scoop some poop, volunteer at an adoption event, help feed a feral cat colony. Buy them lunch and ask why, since they do so much for animals, they aren’t vegan yet. Give them a popular cookbook. Take them grocery shopping. Find out how you can be supportive and encouraging.

Then find out how you can do more for animals than signing a few online petitions and clicking ‘like’ to give a nonprofit a dollar.

A rescuer spotted "Reese" running across Exposition Boulvard in South L.A. near USC. She was one foot away from being killed by a van. When she got to campus, people helped catch her, but would do no more. To adopt Reese email SCAadoptions@yahoo.com.

Los Angeles area rescues with vegan cred:

ARME

Stray Cat Alliance

Strangest Angels

Molly’s Mutts and Meows

activist, animal rescue, companion animals, liberation, liberationist, speciesism, Vegan Outreach

September 29th, 2011 by Gary Smith

All sentient beings feel pain. Meat, dairy and eggs come from sentient beings. Meat, dairy and eggs always cause pain. Humans do not have a biological need to eat meat, dairy and eggs. So, if you choose to eat meat, dairy and eggs, you are choosing to cause pain and to participate in exploitation and murder. Participating in pain and murder is always unethical. The ethical choice is vegan.

animal rights, ethical, vegan

September 8th, 2011 by Gary Smith

I appreciate your willingness to chat. I would say that most of our views about animals come from the culture that we grew up in. We have been taught that animals are lower than us and hence we can eat and use them as we like. Very few of us ever challenge this thinking because a) it asks us to challenge other views that we have about our culture and b) it asks us to question our values and ethics. Neither are necessarily easy to do.

It’s as simple as I do not need to eat any animal products, wear clothing that comes from animals, support any form of entertainment that uses animals or buy any products that come from testing on animals. Since I do not need to use animals, I have an ethical choice to make. Do I support the harming and killing of animals for my pleasure, tradition or convenience or do I make choices that are more in alignment with my values?

Very few us have values that support harming animals yet almost all of us engage in harming animals directly or indirectly. The reason that our values do not support harming animals is because at our core, we are kind beings. Why would we want to make another suffer? Why would we possibly want to inflict pain on another if we don’t have to? And of course, whether we harm individuals directly or indirectly, by paying farmers and slaughterhouse workers to do it for us, we are causing harm. This is not in our nature. We have to hide this from ourselves. We have to repress the violence that we cause others, that is why people get so upset when a vegan shares this information with them. Because we now a choice. We either continue to repress this information (which becomes more difficult) or we make a new choice. I admire your willingness to look.

Whether someone addresses this from a spiritual or religious perspective, both center on the idea of compassion. We can make compassionate choices three times a day by choosing to eat beans, legumes, grains, nuts and seeds, fruits and vegetables. I find it difficult to near impossible to believe in a God that would put creatures here for us to force breed, confine, torture and ultimately kill, when we don’t have a biological need to do so. That would not be a compassionate God.

Speciesism is what allows for all other forms of isms. If human beings believe that they are superior to another animal (since we are all animals), then it makes it easier to believe that we are superior to other races, religions, sexes, sexuality and the like. Speciesism is the the largest form of ism and also the most ignored. The industries that profit from animal exploitation are begging you to ignore me and your heart. They only survive (and sadly thrive) due to our ignorance of speciesism or our unwillingness to look. Thanks for looking.

animal rights, specieism, vegan

September 4th, 2011 by Gary Smith

I’ve read quite a few articles and discussions on the internet (and in books) debating whether human beings are naturally omnivores or herbivores. I’m sure you’ve seen the debate; humans don’t have claws, sharp teeth, the stomach acidity nor intestinal tracts to digest meat. True omnivores don’t need to cook animal flesh, if you put a baby in a crib with an apple and a bunny, the baby won’t eat the bunny (he won’t eat the apple either since he has no teeth, by that’s a different discussion).

On the other side of the debate, they say humans evolved because we ate meat, how can we be herbivores if we need to take a B12 supplement, our species would never have survived had we subsisted strictly on plants.

These arguments and debates are distractions, and a waste of time.

“Many of us are tempted to strain credulity and torture the evidence to ‘prove’ humans are ‘naturally’ vegan,” PaleoVeganology blogger Robert Mason says in the new book Vegan for Life by Virginia Messina, MPH, RD and Jack Norris, RD. “This is a trap, and one into which carnists (specially paleo dieters) would love us to fail; the evidence isn’t on our side. There is no doubt that hominids ate meat…The argument for veganism has always been primarily ethical, and ought to remain that way. It’s based on a concern for the future, not an obsession about the past.”

Why does it matter if we are scientifically omnivores or herbivores? What matters is that in 2011, we do not need to eat meat, dairy or eggs to survive nor in fact thrive. We can subsist by strictly eating plants (and avoiding using individuals for clothing, entertainment and laboratory testing). Since this is the case, we can make an ethical argument against both eating and using nonhuman animals. If we do not need to breed, confine, torture and ultimately murder nonhuman animals for survival, then we are making a selfish choice, a speciesist choice to exploit others for our gain and enjoyment.

By keeping the focus where it should be, on the ethics, we don’t get pulled down the road of yet another distracting debate, where ultimately there is no winner, and the loser is animals. Next time you are tempted to go down that road, pull back for a minute and bring the focus back to the ethics.

animal rights, diet, health, herbivore, omnivore, vegan, Vegan For Life

August 21st, 2011 by Gary Smith

The big story in the community is that former president Bill Clinton has gone vegan. Not to be a Debbie Downer, but President Clinton has not gone vegan, he is eating a plant-based diet.

Veganism is an ethical philosophy that incorporates the abolition of nonhuman animals from food, clothing, pets, entertainment and animal experimentation. I suppose I’m happy that he has chosen to eat a plant-based diet, at least for the short-term benefit to nonhuman animals, but the problem with getting excited about celebrities going “vegan” is that most do it for their own benefit, not the benefit of others.

Inevitably, they decide that they’ve reached their intended goal, lowered their cholesterol, lost weight, or whatever selfish goal moved them to eat a plant-based diet in the first place. Then they start eating animals again, often very publicly. Whatever positive gain was made by them eating a plant-based diet is completely erased once they stop. In fact, the negative is much greater. It reinforces to the public that being vegan is unrealistic, a hardship, tastes terrible; that we all secretly want to eat dead animals and their secretions again, and all the other negative perceptions out there. Often, more attention is given to the fact that they are no longer vegan than when they were.

So, good on Clinton for not eating animals and their secretions, for now. I’m sure he’s a fine guy, if you put aside DOMA, DADT, starving 500,000 Iraqi children with sanctions, NAFTA, shipping jobs overseas, AEDPA (Anti-terrorism and Effective Death penalty Act), but I digress. Maybe he’ll have a realization and realize that being vegan is not about his health desires and needs, but about animals. Don’t get me wrong, nothing makes me happier than seeing Vegan on food products, cleansers, in the media, book titles and the like, but furthering the confusion that being vegan is a diet and not an ethical philosophy is frustrating.

So, I won’t be posting about how awesome it is that he’s now vegan, unless I see him show up at a protest, handing out vegan literature, tossing his leather wingtips, silk tie and wool suits.

animal rights, Bill Clinton, diet, rant, vegan

July 30th, 2011 by Kezia

Because of our work, we’ve had a number of opportunities to interact with animal exploiters. Recently we reached out to a vivisection lab on behalf of Beagle Freedom Project to see if they were able to release any dogs to us. The following is adapted from the reply email we received. It maintains the spirit of the original although some details have been changed.

To underscore the disregard that researchers have for their non-human “subjects,” we made a few more changes.

Plus, we were tired of picking on the Sri Lankans.

Thank you for your email concerning our hominid animal models.

Our institution maintains purpose-bred Jamaicans which are genetically structured such that they are susceptible to developing Gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) when exposed to excess stomach acid. We have bred them to have exceptionally large esophagi, and as such they do not appear to even be aware that they are having an acid reflux attack.

These humans are content and extremely well cared for. They are utilized repeatedly for the purpose of developing new acid reflux drugs. 20 million Americans suffer from this debilitating and sometimes fatal disease. Our work here is vital to the eradication of GERD, so, needless to say these Jamaicans are extremely valuable and we do not euthanize them nor give them away unless there is some compelling reason.

We have found other institutions from time to time that have accepted some of these humans when they have become too old for study or are no longer of use for other reasons. Although sick or infirm Jamaicans may be unsuitable for your organization, and would not make appropriate household pets, we will add you to this list and will contact you when there is a need to find homes for such humans. Thank you for your concern and interest.

This purpose-bred Jamaican has an exceptionally large esophagus

animal testing, beagles, communication, speciesism, vivisection