Helping Them

Tell Japan to Join a Ban on Bluefin Tuna – The Petition Site.

The Atlantic Bluefin Tuna is on its way to extinction. The greatly overfished species is collected at four times the legal limit, and the fish are collected from fisheries before they are old enough to reproduce, making for a very unsustainable, but unfortunately very lucrative, fishing industry.

The UN’s Convention on International Trade in Endgangered Species of Flora and Fuana (CITES) will meet in March 2010 to propose a formal ban on the international trade of this coveted fish, in an attempt to conserve this declining species. However, Japan, where the bluefin tuna is used in a pricey sashimi delicacy and where 80% of Mediterranean bluefin tuna is consumed, says that even if this ban is enacted, they will ignore it.

In order for the ban to pass, CITES will need 2/3 approval from the 175 member countries. This ban could be an important step in the conservation of the bluefin tuna — once a species is added to the CITES list they are not traditionally removed — but Japan is a significant part of the bluefine tuna market and it’s rejection of this ban will have a huge impact on the future of the species.

Tell the Prime Minister of Japan to be environmentally responsible and comply with any ban on the international trade of bluefin tuna.

Meet Saigon. She is Australia’s last remaining circus elephant. She’s now 55 years of age and too old to perform, but she is yet to get the retirement she deserves. Instead, she continues to endure the stress of being trucked from town to town with Perry Bros. Circus. For weeks on end she acts as a living billboard for the circus, standing in a barren enclosure next to the big top on a suburban block. Each new location causes Saigon additional stress. The one constant is the electric fence that surrounds her. Instead of her natural environment she faces traffic noise, busy shopping centres and human faces staring at her. That her truck has become Saigon’s respite from the world speaks to the scale of psychological abuse she has suffered.

Animals Australia is calling upon Perry Bros to retire Saigon from circus life and to a facility where her behavioural needs can be met, and where she can enjoy quality of life for the first time in her life, for the rest of her life.

Your help is needed to urge Perry Bros Circus to agree to relocate Saigon to an appropriate facility where she can finally find peace and enjoy life as an elephant.
We, the undersigned, call on Perry Bros Circus to permit its solitary elephant Saigon to be retired from circus life and homed in an appropriate facility where her behavioural needs can be met and where she can enjoy quality of life, for the rest of her life.

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/free-saigon?z00m=19826376

Live pigs blown up in government military research laboratory

On Sunday, details emerged concerning shocking experiments being conducted on live pigs at Porton Down, a secretive military research centre in Wiltshire. In a series of tests, 18 live pigs were placed just a few feet away from explosives, which were then detonated. The pigs were left to bleed until almost a third of their blood had drained from their bodies, to see how long they could then be kept alive.

Before the tests, scientists inserted tubes into the blood vessels and bladders of the pigs, and removed their spleens. A wire was placed in a major blood vessel in the abdomen to ensure that the vessel was lacerated during the explosion.

These experiments were supposed to recreate the effects of an explosion in an enclosed space, in order to simulate the effects of terrorist attacks on civilian targets. However, MPs and animal protection groups have questioned the validity of the tests, as well as the ethics of using live animals. People are not the same as pigs, so using them does not tell us how people would suffer in similar blasts, and, sadly, there are many human victims around the world who could be studied to give scientifically useful information.

Contact the Home Office And write to your Member of Parliament to demand an end to warfare experiments on animals

Via: http://www.animalaid.org.uk/h/n/NEWS/news_experiments//2255//