In your face

Anita Evans
Vilcabamba Ecuador, August 2010

As many of you will know New Zealand is sold as clean, safe and green (news flash, this is a very good marketing campaign based on some distant past). You may have also been lead to believe that we are good to our animals (which for the average middle class kiwi is probably true).

You will also notice when you visit Ecuador the stray dogs, donkeys with sores on them, donkeys overworked to the point of collapse, the roosters tied up which are used for cock fighting or the pigs tied up and you may be horrified by what you see. The difference here is that what you see with Ecuador and other Latin American countries (i.e. Peru and its rubbish) is: it is in your face. There are just as many loved and cared for animals in Ecuador as there are abused. And the same can be said for New Zealand for example. It is just that the abuse is in not in your face in 1st world countries.

You HAVE to WATCH the episode of Animal House that aired on TVNZ on the 2nd June 2010. It is available on http://tvnz.co.nz/content/3501579.xhtml. Sorry, TVNZ only makes this available to people living in New Zealand. Hmmm, they could do a membership and charge a small  fee to overseas visitors to view their footage. Not a bad suggestions given that the average past time for most kiwis is ‘the big OE’ or going overseas to work. Just think of the database they could create around people's viewing taste and the value that information would have on the world market. I don’t condone this type of corporate information gathering but like the rest of the world you have to live with some of it for now until it all falls over. In the meantime it would be good to have access to their information and video clips internationally so that I can use it to make my point which is the opposite of the corporate world. And also so I can keep up to date on my favorite Kiwi programmers while overseas.

So, since TVNZ don’t do this I’ve written about what I saw of one of the segments in this episode of Animal House.

The SPCA (Society for the Prevention of Curtly to Animals) inspector goes out to a property in West Auckland (Auckland is NZ’s biggest city with approximately 1.4 million people in it). It is a small goat farm. The film footage shows goats (lots of them) that are really masticated. They have no clean water and are standing in their own effluent. Dead goat carcasses lie in open pits that are just covered with a piece of old roofing iron with flies and god knows what else around them. The inspector enters a rundown barn in it he finds an illegal slaughter house there is blood everywhere with rodents running around. Some of the goats are standing in other dead goats remains. Trust me it was one of the most disturbing things I have watched in a long time. I cannot do justice to the horror that was shown. And this is the ‘edited’ version for general TV audience. I hate to think what the real scene was like. I applauded the SPCA inspector, what a job.

What blew me away with all this evidence is: the SPCA inspector can’t uplift all the animals from the slaughter house. He could only take the ones that were on the brink of dying on their feet and had to leave the other masticated animals to continue suffering, because of ‘the law’ in NZ. So much for a 1st world country, we still have to wait till the animal has actually suffered and boarding on death row before we can act.

The difference between a first world country and an emerging 3rd world country is: a very good propaganda program.

Those humans living in a first world country are lead to believe (and believe me most of them do):

A) that they are better people than those living in countries that are not first world. Better because they are more educated, and intelligent (have access to ‘good education’ and ‘clean water’) and let’s be honest here and not mince words or beat around the bush or be PC politically correct, because they are white. Yeah right!! The SPCA guy still can’t remove these animals from the filth.

B) that the first world countries can provide a better standard of living, better healthcare etc. Yeah right!! Ask anyone who is on a waiting list for public hospital or financially hard up.

Where is our 1st world intelligence to allow these atrocities on animals to even happen in a 1st world country???

Do we really have a better quality of life?? How many hours does the middle class person work to pay for their rent\mortgage, power, phone, food, heating let alone insurance, medical, that wonderful education system etc. They keep us so knuckled down to the tread mill that we cannot use our 1st world intelligence to even stop cruelty to animals (let alone humans) in our own back yard! By the time ‘first worldies’ get home from work they are consumed by the mundane tasks of life (and the homework from that wonderful educations system) and finally collapse into bed. We cannot see the trees for the forest.

If you pick up that I am ticked off that would be a good assessment. 

This brief article is meant to get to the people that believe in A and B. Which is probably not the people reading it as you are no doubt already awake. So please point anyone you know to this article who you would like to try and wake up. If you are not an awake person and are reading this, then please, please start using whatever time you can spare to read such web sites as www.nexusmagazine.com or www.uncensored.co.nz or the books The Power of Now or The New Earth AND stop believing in what you read and see in mainstream media.

Keep in mind that these programs are the edited version of the reality that the SPCA staff experienced. I found the edited version of the reality bad enough, hate to think what the unedited version was like.

I am grateful to the producers of Animal House (for making the reality of animal welfare in 1st world country like NZ in your face) for without them I would not be able to give another example of the NONE difference between a 1st world countries and any other type of country.

We are all humans consumed by the reality that we believe in our heads (news flash: you can change that reality). How animals rate in that reality is up to the many factors that make up the programming that makes up the reality that we all have our own version of.

So, before you are appalled by the animal atrocities that occur in non 1st world countries maybe you should take a visit to your local SPCA (or equivalent) or even better volunteer to work there and see how bad the real world is for animals in your world, where you live right now!

Where there are humans who are not awake there will be hardship for animals, and other fellow humans. The solution: we all must wake up!

P.S. for those that are thinking such thoughts along the lines of “it’s good we have an SPCA”. I say wake up people and ask “why do we need an SPCA if we are the supposed most intelligent species on the earth (another myth sold to us by the propaganda machine)?” Dargh, folks, animals should not be hurt in the first place by humans.

The fact we need an organization to clean up a mess should be a wake up call to us – to change our ways. If we didn’t abuse animals in the first place we wouldn’t need the SPCA and the good people there could do something else with their time instead of cleaning up our mess.

The same goes for ANY thing that has been put in place to clean up our human mess. The mess in the first place is the problem!