Expand your vocabulary......

Bycatch: Bycatch occurs when fishing equipment, such as giant nets or longlines with thousands of baited hooks, snag animals other than what they are intended to catch.

Fish are also animals, we often forget (or ignore) this fact. Fish are sentient animals that feel pain, apparently have complex emotional lives  and can engage in some types of sophisticated thinking that humans are unable to achieve until at least 4 years of age.

Shrimp, the crawly looking animal that so many people like to eat, are also fish....they too can suffer.  Jonathan Safran Foer, in his book Eating Animals, also points out that the human appetite for shrimp has additional amount of misery added to it (additional to the suffering of the shrimp):

The average shrimp-trawling operation throws 80 to 90 percent of the sea animals it
captures overboard, dead or dying, as bycatch. (Endangered species amount to much of this bycatch.) Shrimp account for only 2 percent of global seafood by weight, but shrimp trawling accounts for 33 percent of global bycatch. We tend not to think about this because we tend not to know about it. What if there were labeling on our food letting us know how many animals were killed to bring our desired animal to our plate? So, with trawled shrimp from Indonesia, for example, the label might read:   26 pounds of other sea animals were killed and tossed back into the ocean for every 1 pound of this shrimp. p. 49

The amount of global bycatch per year? One source estimates this to be on the order of 20 million tons. 

Besides discarding millions of tons of unwanted fish, hundreds of thousands of small whales, dolphins, porpoises, sea turtles, sharks and seabirds are killed in the process of capturing target species by trawls, seine and drift nets, and longlines.

The blog: "We're All Animals" recently posted some excellent information about shrimp, fish and fishing.  Andrew Hunt, the author of the blog is a fine writer and I urge you to read the post.

Bunny News: Out at the Heartland Rabbit Rescue this morning I had the good fortune to be present at what was a wonderful event to behold.  Benson is a small black bunny....very small, he may be the smallest (full-grown) bunny living there.  Benson is shy, shy to the point of isolating himself inside a small shelter in his enclosure...he rarely shows himself and is essentially a hermit. 

I was told that he was terrified when picked up and if placed outside he was too frightened to explore and would hide under or in anything he could. 

This is not a good thing, rabbits like people, need to be stimulated, rabbits need to hop, explore, sniff, taste grass....be a rabbit.  So, this morning Benson was taken outside and placed in an enclosure...before we could shut off one end he decided to go exploring....he hopped and sniffed and looked around and hopped some more. 

Benson and Midnight

He was bunnying right along and even allowed Midnight the pony to greet him, even though he jumped a little when Midnight snorted.  It was one of the neatest thing I have ever seen.  Jeanne (the founder and hero of HRR) said that this was not the Benson she knew.

To be a witness when someone makes their world bigger (in a happy way) is about as good as it gets.  Volunteering with homeless and abandoned animal people offers benefits unobtainable anywhere else. I feel humbled that Benson decided to grow a little when I happened to be there. Thank you very much, Benson (and Midnight).

The Oklahoma Connection

The post on July 22, 2010 mentioned an Oklahoma connection associated with the beagle rescue.  In addition to the beagles, 55 macaque monkeys were taken from the animal exploiting laboratory.  A primate rescue/shelter here in central Oklahoma, Mindy's Memory, has become the home for 8 of the rescued animals.  You can follow their progress by visiting the Mindy's Memory website.

Midnight is the individual wearing black.

Earlier this month, Heartland Rabbit Rescue had some visitors from Austin.  The photograph of the visitors shows them with the resident Rabbit Rescue pony, Midnight.  There are several hooved folks that live there, including 2 donkeys (Judy and Molly).

The girls (Judy and Molly) are very diligent in sounding the alarm if marauding dogs or coyotes approach their home although their skills at detecting hungry hawks still need development. 

Below is a photograph showing a young visitor from Norman along with Molly and Judy.

Molly has a white forehead, Judy has a gray forehead and the visitor wears a red football shirt.

Christina, over at the Rabid Tidbits blog has posted some current photographs of the baby bunnies recently born at Heartland Rabbit Rescue.  It is astonishing how fast they are growing.

Most of us who live in cities are rather limited in the variation of animal species that we have the opportunity to interact with. One of the many benefits of volunteering at a sanctuary or rescue facility is the chance to get to know different kinds of animal folks and different individuals.  Each rabbit is unique with her or his own likes and dislikes, behaviors and moods.  Just as is each donkey, each pony, each dog, cat or human.  We humans tend to lump other species all together and presume that we then know about them.  This is no more true for human animals than it is for rabbit animals (or others).

Volunteering, especially for young humans, offers them the opportunity to become more sophisticated in their knowledge about the other Earthlings they share this planet with.  Once you become friends with a living being, it becomes more problematic to then see that being (or others like her or him) as a "thing" to be exploited or abused or killed.  For most of us, anyway.....there are exceptions.