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Denis Giles

23 April 2018

Created: 23 April 2018

Last Updated: 23 April 2018

Hits: 1672

By  Maneka Sanjay Gandhi

So many companies test on animals. Even those that don’t need to do so. For instance, perfume companies by now have isolated all the ingredients needed to make a perfume. It is simply a matter of mixing them. But they continue to spray the perfume in rabbits’ eyes, slice their skins open and rub it in, and other terrible tests. This is done by perfumers like Aramis, Balenciaga, Bvlgari, Cacharel, Donna Karan, Dunhill Fragrances, Elizabeth Arden, Gucci Fragrances, Hugo Boss, Jo Malone, Lacoste Fragrances, Marc Jacobs Fragrances, Michael Kors, Missoni, Ralph Lauren Fragrances, Tommy Hilfiger, and Kenzo.

Toothpaste companies make animals eat their products to see after how many toothpastes the animal dies. Does it prove anything? Has any human ever eaten five toothpaste tubes of goo? Or even one? But Aquafresh, Close-up, Colgate, Crest, Listerine, Mentadent, Pearl Drops, Sensodyne, Signal, Old Spice, Right Guard, continue to test.

The animal testing and experimentation industry is everywhere. It is secretive, pervasive and profitable. Most of you don’t even know that the products that you buy have so much suffering in them. But why this needless exploitation of animals in research, product testing and education? India used to buy over 1 crore frogs a year for school dissection. When the government banned this, it made no difference to the quality of education. Kerala teachers insisted that they should kill something, so, for years the frog suppliers turned into cockroach suppliers, until one chief minister stopped this as well. Zoology teachers insisted on the killing of 1000 + animals during the course of 3 years. When it was stopped, the teaching improved – but every now and then some zoology teacher will insist on trying to restart this. Ask the suppliers of animals where the nexus is, and they will point their fingers at the teacher. Rabbits used to be tested in the making of injections – even though these are machine made. When then government banned it, the same injections continue to be made. The government pesticide council has ordered that the testing of animals till they die is to be stopped. This will have no impact on the pesticides at all. Thousands of soaps and perfumes do not test on animals, and they are just as good. It has been found that 90% of the medicines tested on animals have failed . So why does this carry on?

It is a well entrenched business mafia that continues to insist on animals being experimented on. It hides in the garb of science. It is an international, government-sanctioned and -funded, multi-billion rupee business. To give you one example: Raids done by my organization ten years ago found a dealer in Agra who had over 20,000 dead animals in his house as specimens. He was a retired forest officer. Most of them were wild protected species; crocodiles, snakes, bats, every kind of mammal. The police found, through his computer, that he was selling to certain labs in Delhi University. When the wildlife department passed laws saying that no school/college will keep specimens, it was the illegal buyers in this list (who are teachers) that took delegations to ministers to protest.

One researcher in JNU killed a rat a day for over 10 years to prove that when rats were asleep, they were not awake. His salary was huge and he lived rent free at the university as a scientist. There are thousands like him. India has a CPCSEA committee that regulates the experiments on animals . I created this body and it was supposed to stop duplicative and unnecessary experiments. It has gone into the hands of people who pass every kind of experiment for a fee. If they stopped an experiment, the researcher would lose his grant, so it is easier to split the money in advance.

It is simple to get grants for experimenting on animals. Governments, and private research centres, give them. For instance, in America 47 % of the grants given by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have an animal research-based component. In 2015, this came to well over $10 billion in funding for projects that included animal experimentation. So, scientists band together and professional lobbying organizations craft, and market, sophisticated campaigns to defend and promote even more animal research.

Who benefits?  The salaries of researchers and technicians, who carry out animal experiments, provide financial incentives. Universities and other academic institutions profit from the percentage of “overhead” that they receive from the grants for animal experiments from the government. Unthinking politicians and clever bureaucrats allow laws mandating the testing of pharmaceuticals, chemicals, drugs, to assess safety and efficacy. The defence ministry allows testing of guns and gases on animals, the carmakers allow diesel testing on animals, the ministry of agriculture allows it for pesticides, the Consumer Product Safety Councils allow it for products, and FSSAI allows it for foods. Everyone benefits – except the millions of animals that suffer and die needlessly.

Who else benefits? NGOs posing as charities that raise billions of dollars from well-meaning people, hoping to find cures for virtually every human disease —even when animal models for human diseases fail to predict what is safe or effective for people after decades of funding.

Animal breeders profit handsomely from breeding and genetically engineering animals, from mice to primates. Recent prices quoted from one animal supply company’s catalogue identified White Rabbits as high as $352 each, Beagles from China for $1,049 and some primates costing more than $8,000 each.

Suppliers, of food, cages and equipment related to animal-model research, have a lucrative business. Veterinarians, employed to supposedly care for research animals, are paid highly to ignore the suffering and give their stamps of approval.

Pharmaceutical companies fuel the animal research “machine” by conducting animal studies before moving to the real research on human beings. If the humans suffer or die – as they often do, the company protects itself legally by saying that trials did OK on animals. These corporate giants use animal studies as a legal safety net by telling courts that they did what the law requires—prove the safety of a drug in animals—and therefore are not liable when a drug harms a human.

Even the media profits from the “publish or perish” mentality within the scientific community to justify animal research by using the results of animal tests to announce “medical miracles,” which help them sell more journals, newspapers and increase TV ratings. On an average there are three stories a week on how testing on rats has shown every kind of cure – from miracle hair growth by using an oil used for cooking fast food, to a cancer cure. Two days later this is forgotten and the cure is never heard of again.

Government is made largely of politicians and bureaucrats who go with the flow. This government endorsed a proposal made by the last: to put Rs 200 crores into 100 acres of land in Telengana to grow animals for research. If I asked them for the same money for better sanitary towels, the answer would be that it is a waste of money.

Anyone opposing experimentation wilts under opposition from these businesses. I have faced it many times. At the moment I am trying to get capsules made vegetarian. The entire gelatine industry is opposing this. So, media articles come out regularly, from so called independent journalists, saying that vegetarian capsules are bad and expensive. The committee to regulate this is full of industry people. It will happen – but it will take me and you some time to wade through the vested interests. The government mandated a red /green dot (veg/nonveg) on household products. Immediately the “beauty council”, which is a conglomerate of companies who produce everything from soap to house cleaners, went to court and got a stay. It has been four years now and not once has it come up in court !!! So you can imagine how many people have been “influenced”.

Some animal tests take months or years to conduct and analyze (e.g., 4-5 years in the case of rodent cancer studies), at a cost of hundreds of thousands—and sometimes millions—of dollars per chemical examined. The inefficiency, and exorbitant costs associated with animal testing, makes it impossible for regulators to take up the potential effects of 100,000+ chemicals currently in commerce worldwide, or the more than 1 million combinations of these chemicals to which humans are exposed to every day.

In contrast, computer modelling techniques are lightning-fast, and many cell-based in vitro methods are much more accurate —all at a much lower cost than animal tests.

It is time we looked at smarter science that is human-relevant and can provide safer and more effective solutions to human health needs. This investment, in better more humane science promises, rather than in animal testing, will pay huge dividends in smarter, better solutions for people and animals.

To join the animal welfare movement contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., www.peopleforanimalsindia.org

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Denis Giles

09 April 2018

Created: 09 April 2018

Last Updated: 09 April 2018

Hits: 1799

By Maneka Sanjay Gandhi

In India, there is a term in the Irrigation Department known as "dark area". This means a place where there is no point putting a tubewell as the ground water has fallen below 500 feet. Over the last ten years, more and more areas have become dark. I have an entire block in my constituency which is now being notified as "dark". This area, Bilsanda, till ten years ago, was flush with ground water.

At an individual level, people are making more of an effort to save water – we turn off the tap while brushing our teeth, we use kitchen wastewater to irrigate our gardens, and many of us have installed water-efficient showers and flushes in our homes. But how much water is used to put food on our plates has to be factored in by water economists, if we are not to have water riots in the near future - a la Karnataka/TamilNadu/Kerala/Punjab/Haryana.

All the food we eat needs water to be grown, processed, packaged and delivered to shops and homes. One calorie of meat needs 10 times the water to be produced as one calorie of grain or vegetable. The production of 1 Kcal of beef needs 10.19 litres of water, while just 0.47 litres is required for 1 Kcal of potatoes, 0.51 litres for cereals, 1.34 litres for vegetables and 2.09 litres for fruit. So the more meat we eat, the more water we use. India is the world's third largest beef exporter. It is not just the bodies of dead animals that we are sending out. It is our entire water supply.

At a global level, about one-third of the world’s agricultural water usage goes indirectly, or directly, to animal production. The water footprint, or the amount of water involved in production, has been calculated by Mekonnen and Hoekstra, at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, based on the amount of rainwater and groundwater used, and the amount of water polluted during the production of food. The water footprint of meat is vastly higher than that of grains and vegetables. Beef is the meat with the largest water footprint. Of the 2,422 billion cubic metres of water per year used in global animal production, 798 billion cubic metres goes only towards the production of beef.

What is ‘feed conversion efficiency’? This is the amount of input needed to produce a unit of meat. Among the meats, beef has the lowest feed conversion, meaning that the most amount of feed and water is needed for beef to be produced.

A large amount of water is used at different stages of beef production. . An average of 1,62,59,000 litres of water goes into producing one tonne of cow feed. Crops are grown to be fed to cattle and their cultivation requires huge amounts of water. Cows and buffaloes eat upto 20 kgs of feed per day, including paddy, jowar, berseem, cottonseed, mustard or groundnut cakes etc. Since production of one kg of any of these foods uses anywhere between 1,000-2,000 litres, we can roughly estimate that in India, about 20,000-40,000 litres of water are used daily to feed one beef animal. These animals should directly drink 35-75 litres of water per day, depending on the weather. A further 28 litres of water is estimated to be used for washing an animal daily. Approximately 150 litres per cow/buffalo goes into sanitation and manure removal. At the end of its life, when the animal is killed for its meat, about 15,000 litres of water are used hourly to clean the blood, and other parts, from the slaughterhouse. Washing the meat before packaging and transporting is another burden.

If you add this and consider that one animal weighing 300 kg will yield 100 kgs of beef, the production of a single kilo of beef uses over 15,000 litres of water.

Consider this in comparison to the measly 322 litres used to produce one kg of vegetables, 962 litres for fruit, 1,644 litres for cereals such as maize, oats, barley, wheat etc., and 4,055 litres for one kg of pulses.

The production of meat is increasing every year. In India, the export of beef alone has gone from 0.31 million tons in 1999-2001 to 1.56 million tonnes in 2016. This figure is expected to increase. This means that we are using trillions of litres of our precious water resources not even to feed ourselves, but to feed the rest of the world. We are bearing the burden for rich countries like the Middle East that save their own water while importing ours, while various parts of our own country face drought and famine. Export of food requires huge quantities of fuel, which again uses a large volume of water to process. Since we import our fuel, this is another burden.

As shown in the study by the Dutch scientist Hoekstra, the food-related water footprint of a consumer can be reduced by 36% by shifting from a meat-based diet to a vegetarian diet. Try a simple solution – if you eat half the amount of meat, then you use half the amount of water.

This would give the world a lot more water to use for better purposes and help ensure that vital food resources are grown for, and fed, to humans, rather than livestock. The world's population is predicted to reach a high of 9.6 billion in thirty years. To keep up with this, food production will have to increase by 70% globally, and by 100% in developing countries.

As more food will be needed, more water will be needed to grow this food. A population dependent on meat is unviable to feed. It is a human rights issue as well - it is no longer equitable to spend scarce water to feed some people meat, while other do not even have access to grain.

The dark areas are spreading like a dark shadow. It is only a matter of time before they reach your doorstep and you will have to stand in queues at 2 am for one bucket of water. Then meat will disappear by itself. But by then, the damage will be irreversible.

To join the animal welfare movement contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., www.peopleforanimalsindia.org

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Denis Giles

16 April 2018

Created: 16 April 2018

Last Updated: 16 April 2018

Hits: 1809

By Maneka Sanjay Gandhi

California has a very interesting political system. This allows organisations and individuals to bypass politicians and put potential laws directly to a vote by the general population – as long as they can get enough signatures to support the measure in the first place. This makes sense to me, because, in India, we are at the mercy of politicians who will rarely do anything in public interest, or even think about issues that affect people adversely and need to be corrected. Instead, they will come up with grandiose schemes that never get implemented and, even if they did, are so poorly conceived that they destroy far more – the damming and linking of rivers, the MNREGA scheme, the badly conceived feeding of children which has led to widespread malnourishment, the giving of forests to supposed tribals without verification, the lack of maintenance of heritage and complete ignorance of the value of museums, the lack of a trained teaching system for farmers, and using a defunct system called Krishi Vigyan Kendras, which do nothing and never did… I can think of a million things. The reckless import and use of pesticides and urea is top of my list, along with the export of meat, as that is destroying the country’s forests and water systems. The slaughterhouse export trade is run by NRIs and foreign nationals who loot India. Also on my list is the agriculture ministry’s refusal to even see that animals / fish / birds, grown for meat that are kept badly, injected with hormones, pesticides and antibiotics and eaten by humans, will make the human population ill– as we can see in the steeply rising statistics of people who are going to hospital every day.

So many people campaigned for NOTA on the ballot paper – None Of The Above. It has resulted in nothing. No one makes the trek to a booth to not vote. They stay at home if they don’t like any of the candidates. There is a movement, that comes in fits and starts, on the right to recall an elected person. This will result in mayhem if it ever happens, because anyone who loses an election will spend a lot of money getting signatures. Then there is the movement that women should get one third of the seats by law. None of these movements actually will bring about change to make governance participatory.

What is needed is what California is doing.  Even if we go halfway and take the route, that if an issue can generate enough interest through people signing a minimum of a mandated X votes , then it deserves to be put into Parliament, or the state assembly, and voted on. Let us see where our elected representatives stand on the matter.

At the moment California voters are on the street for an issue we have been fighting here for some years, both in the ministries and courts; which is, to Change the factory farm system so that animals, grown for meat, are not caged for their entire lives.

Is this an issue for just “animal lovers” as we are called? No. It is an issue of health that should be understood and pushed with your local MLA, MP and municipal chairman. Birds, pigs, cattle – especially poultry – are stuffed into small cages. They cannot even raise their wings, so small is the space and so large the number of birds in each cage. To prevent them from fighting for space, owners of poultries cut off their beaks and toes without anaesthesia. They cannot stand without pain but there is no space to sit. They stand in their own faeces, covered with mites that suck their blood. They get very, very sick immediately and are then kept alive with antibiotics, hormones and pesticides. All these go into the meat when the bird is killed and has created major sickness in humans, starting with the superbug which is untreatable, and going on to cancer, epilepsy, kidney failure and every other major disease. This could all be prevented if the birds were allowed to roam freely in the sun with natural food (instead of spoilt grain, cardboard, the dead bodies of fellow chickens and marble mixed with veterinary drugs), given fresh sources of water and allowed to live naturally before being killed. It takes the same space that the poultry now has .

The same problem is with piggeries. The pig is an intelligent and emotional animal and locking her up in a small crate and feeding her badly with only disgusting restaurant waste, inseminating her forcibly and then taking away the babies, makes her very sick. She gets worms, serious illnesses, and all these are passed on to the consumer of pork. Veal is from baby calves who are locked into tight crates so that they cannot move and then starved to death so that they become anaemicand their meat turns white. They are killed in six weeks.

In California, hundreds of volunteers are on the street going from door to door collecting signatures from the mandatory 3,65,000 signatures. They have, by law, a finite time to collect the signatures . Some of them eat meat – they simply don’t want to be sick from it.  The new law, if it comes into being, will ban the sale of all eggs, pork or veal from a caged animal – if campaigners can get enough signatures. If passed, it would be the most progressive farm animal welfare law and the most progressive human health law in the world.

The new measure would ban cages of any kind for hens, gestation crates for mother pigs, so narrow they can’t turn around, and veal crates for calves, which restrict movement for their entire lives. By the end of 2019 all hens would have to be cage-free – living, at minimum, on an open barn floor or in an indoor aviary with multiple levels for birds to go up and down.

It would have national implications, applying not just to in-state famers but to any farmer doing business with the world’s sixth largest economy.

The deadline is May 1st and they have 2 lakh signatures so far.

This is history in the making. It will put California ahead of the European Union, which banned battery cages for poultry in 2012 across Europe– and even cage-free leaders such as Germany and the Netherlands..

In 2008 California passed Proposition 2 in 2008 which banned battery cages and said animals must have space to turn around, lie down and stretch their limbs. In 2016,  Massachusetts made history with the first sales ban on products from confined animals, which passed by a landslide 78%. California is now working to top that .

And India?? Sigh!! Committee after committee has been formed from BIS to FSSAI, the Health ministry, the Drug Controller of India. Each one agrees that something has to be done. But they pass it on to another committee. There is no political will and, in the absence of a clear order, no bureaucrat will move. On top of that there are lobbies of slaughterhouses that will pay bureaucrats and politicians not to change the filthy unhealthy status quo. I wish politicians would put human health on the top of their agenda – everything else would fall into place.

To join the animal welfare movement contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., www.peopleforanimalsindia.org

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Denis Giles

02 April 2018

Created: 02 April 2018

Last Updated: 02 April 2018

Hits: 1708

By Maneka Sanjay Gandhi

An interesting scientific experiment took place last year. Two reasons.  One is because it is about the air expelled from the anuses of living beings, popularly known as farting. The other, because the scientists investigating asked the public to send them information through a twitter handle called #doesitfart. The information has been printed in a book with the same name.

Fart, also known as flatulence, describes gas generated or held in the stomach or intestines and expelled through the anus. The scientific study of farts is called flatology. Those who have the talent to fart at will are known as flatulists (or comedians).

Few people, and even less scientists, have been brave enough to even talk about this issue. It is usually a matter for pre-teenage boys’ jokes. But the study of the diet and digestive systems of animals is an important part of understanding how they survive and even how they affect climate change.

The data gathering mission was spearheaded by Daniella Rabaiotti, a Ph.D student at the University College of London, a member of  the Zoological Society of London, and environmental researcher. She was asked whether snakes fart, and wrote asking a colleague, David Steen, a biologist at Auburn University. “Snakes sometimes discharge faeces and musk as a defensive strategy, and this is often accompanied by what I would consider classic fart noises,” he said. Rabaiotti decided to make a large study of different animals. From there #DoesItFart was born.

Hundreds of biologists, researchers, wildlife enthusiasts and laypersons have written in from all over the world. Nick Caruso, a PhD student at the University of Alabama, created a spreadsheet. Each entry was submitted to researchers to verify.

Here are some interesting details about gastric gases and how they are discharged out of the posterior portal:

Guinea pigs produce clouds of brown mist that “stink to high heaven.” Lions fart and so do Orangutans. Bobcats are supposed to be the smelliest with their “squirrel-based farts” (I doubt that they would be smellier than the person who sits next to you on a plane or in a closed car) They are in close competition with woodlice who excrete ammonia. The dog and the cat also emit gases (and often take the blame for their owner’s bad stomachs).

Here are some of the entries: “Do chimpanzees fart? Yes. “Worst when eating figs. So loud and frequent we locate them in forest occasionally by following the farts; Even worse when eating Cynometra seeds!” wrote University of Kent evolutionary anthropology Ph.D Adriana Lowe. Bats do, according to David Bennett, a PhD at Queen Mary University of London. And the bigger they are, the harder they honk.

Tapirs? Most mammals pass wind and some insects as well. Birds do not pass gas, They don’t have the same gas-producing bacteria in their gut that are found in mammals and other farting animals, and food passes quickly through a bird’s digestive system, which leaves no time for a build-up. Marine invertebrates such as oysters, whelks, salamanders, mussels and crabs do not fart either. The Pogonophoran Worm, the Jellyfish, Corals and Sea Anemones cannot fart as they lack anuses. If we count air coming out of the siphons of squid/octopus/cuttlefish as farting, yes, they do. Frogs can, and do, fart quite often and rather pungently. Rats can fart but they can’t burp. Turtles fart, and their farts smell incredibly bad.

It’s not only interesting which animals fart, but how they do. This is what the spread sheets say-

"The copperhead snake elicits a small squeak, so small that you think you may be mistaken, until it hits you. Very dry with a slight hint of stalemusk. The orangutan does it often and happily. The millipede emissions are of the silent but deadly variety (methane and hydrogen sulfide. Whereas most animals that fart have soft, fleshy derrières, millipedes have hard valves that probably act as silencers !)" Seal farts smell like lutefisk which is a Nordic dish made of lye that can drive anyone else out of the house. The Burmese Python "Thick and meaty? If it were a colour it would be brownish-yellow." "Spotted Hyenas are especially bad after eating camel intestines."

Herrings communicate with each other by expelling air through their anuses producing pulses of sound that is too high for their predators to hear.

Honey badgers emit smelly, suffocating secretions and gas from their anal glands, which they then use to mustard-bomb unsuspecting bee hives. This causes the bees to flee their homes and leave the honey behind for the honey badger.

Some snakes, like the Sonoran Coral Snake, also weaponize their farts and use them to scare off unsuspecting predators.

The gases vary in different species. Most farts contain hydrogen, carbon dioxide, nitrogen and sulphurous gases (with the latter responsible for much of the smell), but scientists are concerned about another common component, methane, since it is a potent greenhouse gas. According to a paper published in the latest issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology, nearly 30 percent of Earth's methane emissions originate from plant eating animals grown for meat. According to the EPA, cows are among the top methane makers. Cows release an estimated 551 to over 1,100 pounds of methane per day. Goats produce a lot of methane in their stool, farts, belches and even breath. In 2015, an airplane in Singapore was forced to make an emergency landing when the smell of goat farts was mistaken for smoke in the cargo hold. The flight was diverted, inspected and delayed for hours, according to the Daily Mail. NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Science determined that a pig emits about 3.3 pounds of methane per year and a sheep produces 18 pounds of methane. A horse can produce 45.5 pounds of methane gas per year, but amounts vary. A lactating mare, for example, only releases 34 percent of the methane released by a lactating dairy cow. While elephants are not ruminant animals, they do produce an incredible amount of gas, however. According to the International Elephant Foundation, a car "could travel 20 miles on the amount of methane produced by one elephant in a single day."

Each adult person emits about a third of a pound of methane per year, according to the Goddard study. That is a fraction of what cows produce. The United Nations, however, estimates that there are at least 7 billion people on the planet now, so total methane output stacks up by sheer numbers alone.

Termites may be tiny, but they are mighty methane emitters. While an individual termite cannot produce much gas, a study published in the Journal of Environmental Science and Technology, from Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, determines that termites contribute methane "that accounts for at least 5% of all global emissions." Other researchers say that the percentage is much higher. According to Rentokil the pesticide company, cockroaches release more methane in relation to their body size than any other creature they’ve ever had to deal with.

A methyl mercaptan gas leak at a Dupont facility in Texas killed people. Farts contain not just methyl mercaptan, but other asphyxiants like flammable methane, nitrogen and dimethyl sulphides. The amounts depend on your diet. However, since each fart has only 110 millilitres of gas you cannot make a homemade weapon.

Have fun! At least it’s a novel way to introduce children to serious science.

To join the animal welfare movement contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., www.peopleforanimalsindia.org