Animals
Removing Cats From Laps Illegal in Canada?
Okay, this is a joke but kudos to Humane Canada for leveraging April Fools’ Day to highlight their efforts to promote legislation that protects animals from cruelty, and ensures they are treated humanely and with respect. The headline to the story was, “Proposed New Bill Will Finally Offer Protection to Comfortable Cats Sitting on People's Laps” and it went on to say “Humane Canada has been quietly working for the past few months on the introduction of a new Bill that would offer protection to [all] felines … who choose to get comfortable on top of a human's lap … Those found guilty of moving cats from their laps before the cat decides to leave … could face fines of up to $1,000.” Rumour has it that cats were not amused.
Food
Iconic Foods Go Plant-Based
Ice cream and donuts — the ultimate comfort foods — are going plant-based in the most unlikely places. Even baseball parks, usually temples of junk food, are making the change. Texas Rangers stadium and Wrigley Field in Chicago are serving soft ice cream made by Oatly, the Swedish plant-based food juggernaut. It’s all part of Oatly’s plan to expand their market by targeting sports fans. Meanwhile across the pond, Dunkin’ Donuts is introducing “vegan-friendly” donuts in Belgium and the Netherlands. The 41 flavours include mango passion, maple crumble and double-stuffed strawberry. Making the switch to plant-based foods is easier when your favourite, if guilty-pleasure, foods are easier to find!
the Climate Crisis
Two Things We Can Do
In the face of what can seem like an overwhelming task to slow down global warming, it’s understandable that people give up — thinking that what they do isn’t going to make a difference. This simply isn’t true according to a recent article in The Atlantic. There are two things everyone can do that will make an appreciable difference. The first is to reduce food waste and the second is to eat less meat. As individuals, our diet is typically the biggest source of our emissions. The article contains tips on easy ways to cut back and explains how it will have an impact. Compared with these two changes, the effects of other changes we might make e.g., eating organically, locally or seasonally, are only marginal.
words of wisdom
“Those that say it doesn’t matter what you do to a fish … haven’t really observed fish. I think it’s a justification for doing dastardly things to innocent creatures. It’s the only explanation I can think of for treating fish with such a barbaric attitude.”
— Legendary oceanographer and marine biologist, Dr. Sylvia Earle.
“And while governments are not prepared to take action, and while industry is basically unregulated, the only ethical thing to do is to stop eating fish.”
— Quote from environmentalist George Monbiot’s interview in Seaspiracy.
Photo: Shifaz Abdul Hakkim on Unsplash
on the horizon
Source: Feedbackglobal.org
Feedback, a UK NGO, has a provocative plan to reduce food-related GHG emissions by challenging UK supermarkets to sell 50% less meat and dairy by 2030. The plan is grounded in the logic that the UK cannot meet its net-zero climate targets without reducing emissions from the agriculture and food sector, and that supermarkets play a huge role in influencing what foods consumers purchase.
Feedback, which focuses on practical and policy methods to reduce food waste, provides a menu of choices for supermarkets to act on. These range from changes to store layouts and marketing in favour of plant-based alternatives, to displaying smaller meat portions. More significant actions include reducing the choice of meat and dairy products, removing “fake farm” brands that are a cover for factory farms and not selling UK chicken raised on Brazilian soy.
“The validity and promise of meat and dairy reduction as an essential element of climate mitigation is no longer the subject of real debate. What has been lacking to date has been a clear pathway to realizing the benefits of this change, with policy-makers and businesses reluctant to go further than vague acknowledgements of the benefits of dietary change,” the Feedback report says.
It goes on to say that reducing the amount of meat and dairy consumed in high-income, industrialized countries — combined with halving food waste — could deliver 20% of the global emissions reductions required to meet the Paris Agreement’s limit of 2°C of global warming.
Feedback’s proposal sits at the heart of the debate of who needs to act to fight the climate crisis. Is it up to individuals to change their behaviours and use their buying and voting powers to make more environmentally-friendly choices? Collectively, individuals can drive significant change but businesses and policy makers can’t expect to offload responsibility onto the consumer as a way of avoiding taking action themselves.
Challenging businesses to sell less of their traditional products is a provocative idea. Commercial enterprises are wired to pursue short term profits, balanced with long-term strategic success. Will they see it as being in their interests to pursue a longer term public good — such as reducing emissions — without government incentives?
To effectively combat the climate crisis, we will need to wrap our heads around innovative, more aggressive proposals like this one from Feedback. The answer lies in a concerted effort on the part of the consumer, aggressive climate policy frameworks from governments, and new product offerings and significant emissions reductions from businesses.
perspective
Climate Solutions: Seeing the Big Picture
If the climate crisis seems like a confusing and overwhelming threat, there is a new tool to help understand it and show us how what we do fits into the big picture.
Climate Solutions 101 from Project Drawdown, offers six, 23-minute videos that show how the pieces of the climate puzzle fit together, the causes of the problem and what we can do about it. This is the latest in their ongoing climate advocacy, stemming from the success of the 2017 best-seller “Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming”, by Paul Hawken.
Project Drawdown shows us that five sectors cause 90% of global GHG emissions and just two — electricity generation and food production — are half the problem, responsible for 49% of emissions. And even conservative estimates show that emissions from animal agriculture are 15% of global emissions, more than half of total food production’s contribution.
When it comes to global emissions “we hear a lot more about electricity than we do about food and it turns out they are about equally important,” said Jonathan Foley, Executive Director, Project Drawdown.
“Drawdown” is the point in time that global emissions start to fall. The researchers have documented the causes of the climate crisis across all sectors and then suggest all of the possible solutions, ranked by their potential impact. These range from the incremental to the transformational and show the choices that businesses, governments and individuals can make to drive change.
Of the Top Ten most effective climate actions, #3 is reducing food waste and #4 is adopting a plant-rich diet. The #1 most effective action is to control and reduce refrigerant gases in fridges, freezers and air conditioners.
So, some of the most effective actions involve what we eat and how food is produced. Looking more closely at food production, this chart shows that most sources of food-related emissions are tied to animal agriculture, the most potent of which are methane and nitrous oxide from burping cows and sheep, manure, and chemical fertilizer — much of which is used to grow feed crops.
In the report “Farming Our Way Out of the Climate Crisis”, the Drawdown researchers map out solutions large and small across the spectrum of food production. They have been criticized for advocating incremental emissions reduction in the existing animal agriculture system, such as the debatable impact of grass-fed beef or the amount of carbon sequestered by soil.
But if we focus on transformational rather than incremental change, the impact can be huge as seen below.
The circles in the chart above show the potential impact, sized by opportunity, so the bigger the circle, the bigger the potential climate solution. Changing how we manage food waste and switching to more plant-based diets would have the two biggest impacts on food sector emissions. The researchers say we can “reduce the impacts of agriculture on the environment through our dietary choices, especially by reducing the amount of red meat and dairy products we eat.”
These recommendations are consistent with multiple studies saying people in western nations need to eat less meat, eggs and dairy to reduce emissions if we are to meet the Paris climate goals. For the individual, the lowest hanging fruit to slow down the climate crisis is eating plant-based food and reducing food waste.
pet peeves
A light-hearted glimpse into the lives of our furry or feathered friends.
Do I look like I give a quack?
This female Lesser Scaup doesn’t seem remotely interested in whatever her partner is agitated about.
The deeper dive
Photo: Patrick Browne on Unsplash
Don’t Let Seafood “Launderers” Take You to the Cleaners
If you order sea bass or snapper in a restaurant, do you actually know what you are about to eat? The answer is probably ‘no’ and there’s no easy way to find out.
New evidence shows that seafood fraud is a massive global problem, undermining biodiversity of the oceans, further depleting threatened species of fish and cheating consumers.
The Guardian’s Seascape analysis of 44 recent studies of more than 9,000 seafood samples from restaurants, fish sellers and supermarkets in more than 30 countries found that over one-third (36%) were mislabelled. Seafood fraud involves swapping cheaper fish and passing them off as more expensive fillets, or putting false or misleading information on labels.
Using new DNA analysis techniques, researchers found that of fish labelled “snapper” in Canada, the US, the UK, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand, 40% were mislabelled. In 2018, nearly 70% of samples from across Britain sold as “snapper” were from 38 different species of fish. The UK and Canada had the highest rates of mislabelling at 55%, followed by the US at 38%.
These findings reflect those from earlier investigations by Oceana Canada which showed high rates of seafood mislabelling in supermarkets and restaurants across the country. Canada is stepping up efforts to combat the problem but the measures have been criticized as being too weak – for example, they don’t include restaurants.
Fish fraud is all too easy, difficult to police and highly profitable for the “fish launderers”. Seafood is traded on a global basis through complex and often murky supply chains and a large portion of the global catch is transported from fishing boats to huge factory ships for processing without any meaningful oversight. Seafood fraud also creates the impression that some fish are more abundantly available and undermines efforts to curb overfishing and sea life conservation.
So what can we do?
There is an app to better understand what one is eating and whether it involves threatened species of seafood. But the concept of “sustainable seafood” is problematic and difficult to verify. Another step is to cut back on eating seafood in favour of the new, tasty plant-based seafood. And cell-based seafood, real fish grown from cells in a bioreactor, is on the horizon. Taking these steps means we can enjoy seafood without damaging the oceans and destroying non-target creatures or the sentient beings who live there.
“who” not “what”
An open letter from more than 80 leaders and scholars in animal advocacy and conservation has been sent to the Associated Press calling for an update to its stylebook on the use of personal pronouns for nonhuman animals. The scientific consensus is that other animals are conscious beings — someone not something — and language needs to reflect that. Words matter and the way in which we talk and write about other animals shapes the way we see them — every individual nonhuman animal is a 'who’, not a 'what’. Referring to animals as individuals rather than objects will put us more in touch with the impact we have on them.
Good news
German researchers and tire companies believe that the natural rubber found in the roots of Russian dandelions can be used to produce more eco-friendly tires. Tires currently contain 10-40% natural rubber (rubber trees are a mono-crop grown mostly in SE Asia and linked to deforestation) with the balance being synthetic rubber derived from fossil fuels. Russian dandelions can be grown in moderate climates and on marginal agricultural land.
After successfully making bicycle tires, tire companies say that when Russian dandelions can be grown in sufficient quantity and at a similar price point to natural rubber, they are ready to use them to make car and truck tires. The dandelions on your lawn probably aren’t the Russian variety so you can’t make your own rubber but you can use the flowers to make wine.
New Zealand recently announced it will end all live animal exports by sea. The country hasn't exported live animals for meat for years, but hundreds of thousands of pregnant dairy cows are still being exported — condemned to lives of deprivation and suffering in destination countries and subjected to the risks of sea transport. These dangers made global headlines last year with the sinking of the Gulf Livestock 1 in which 41 crew members and thousands of dairy cows perished.
In yet another example of changing attitudes towards animal protection, NZ’s Agriculture Minister said in his announcement, "The fact is, once animals leave New Zealand by sea we have very limited ability to ensure their wellbeing before they reach their destination ... that is an unacceptable risk to New Zealand's reputation. We must stay ahead of the curve in a world where animal welfare is under increasing scrutiny."
data points
Photo: Cedric Frixon on Unsplash
Six out of the seven species of sea turtles, including loggerheads, greens, and leatherbacks, are now classified as threatened, endangered or critically endangered. The biggest reason is that hundreds of thousands of sea turtles are accidentally caught in shrimp trawl nets, on longline hooks and in fishing gill nets globally every year.
These turtles are what fisheries call “bycatch”, unwanted marine animals that die as a result of becoming entangled in fishing gear that is targeting fish. Countless more turtles drown as a result of being caught in abandoned fishing gear known as ghost nets that drift in the oceans for years.
The exact numbers are unknown because bycatch volumes are not audited or policed. But one study in 2010 estimated that up to eight million sea turtles were killed by commercial fishing between 1990 and 2010. While the fishing industry has taken some measures to reduce the bycatch of sea turtles, they are considered totally insufficient given the scale of the destruction of these animals.
Eating plant-based spares about 105 vertebrates, including 12 farmed land mammals, per person a year according to a new report by AnImal Charity Evaluators, based on data from the UN’s FAO. The calculation takes into account fish and also male chicks who are destroyed at birth by the poultry and egg industries. It doesn’t include lives lost in the food chain or as bycatch.
Here’s a review of the critically acclaimed documentary Gunda made by Russian film-maker Victor Kossakovsky. With no narration or voice overs, it is an intimate exploration of the unfiltered emotional life of a sow and her family. “Sublimely beautiful and profoundly moving”, The New York Times.
charting our path
Plant-Based Food: Moving From Trend to Food Industry Sector
Keeping in mind the low baseline for the percentage increases — not to mention more people are preparing food at home due to the pandemic — it’s still fair to say that plant-based eating is transitioning from a trend to becoming a sector of the food industry. New SPINS data commissioned by The Good Food Institute and the Plant-Based Foods Association (PBFA) show that in 2020, plant-based retail sales in the US grew by 27% (the overall US retail food market grew by 15%) from 2019. Specifically, plant-based meat sales were up 45% and plant-based milk sales were up 20%.
And, sales of plant-based foods in Europe are up by 49% in the last two years according to ProVeg International and Nielsen MarketTrack. The Smart Protein project reports increases of 82% in Austria and 226% in Germany, two countries with traditionally meat-based cuisines. Sales of oat milk were up across the continent and supermarkets continue to expand shelf space for products like plant-based cheese, up 400% in the Netherlands, and plant-based yogurt, up almost 500% in Belgium.
Supported by new product launches and expanded distribution, the increasing demand for alternative protein foods over conventional or traditional choices is being driven by younger, more educated consumers more aware of the environmental, human health and animal welfare impacts of animal-based protein.