08/10/06 Suffering From Canada to Boiling Water
Animal Friends protests against the selling of living animals for food in stores and announce a demo in front of Metro
A demo in front of Metro in Jankomir, Zagreb, will take place on Thursday, August 10, 2006, at 12 noon, during which activists will symbolically close themselves in an aquarium in order to oppose the selling of living animals in stores and chain of stores. With this action they will join the international protest of selling lobsters in Metro.
Lobsters from the US and Canada are being exported to Italy. After they are caught, the animals are sorted out on the assembly line according to their size, and individually being packed in metal boxes with their claws tied. For days and weeks lobsters are left piled on each other in cooling tanks until they are transported to Metro, where they are often left for weeks immobile and without food in aquariums. Their journey of suffering usually ends by having them thrown in boiling water, from which they unsuccessfully try to escape.
Lobsters kept in tanks suffer from stress associated with confinement, low oxygen levels, and overcrowding. Additionally, these sea animals do not have automated nervous systems to put them into a state of shock when they are harmed. Therefore, marine biologists theorize that they feel every second of pain inflicted upon them during transport and before their death in boiling water.
According to Dr. Jaren G. Horsley, an invertebrate zoologist at the National Zoo, lobsters have a "sophisticated nervous system" and feel "a great deal of pain" when cut or cooked alive.
Scientists at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., who have been studying lobsters for more than 20 years, have found them to be unique and fascinating animals. They've found, for instance, that lobsters use complicated signals to establish social relationships. They take long-distance seasonal journeys, can travel more than 100 miles in a year, and can live to be more than 150 years old - if they survive the world’s most devastating predator: humans.
Animal Friends invites the public to sign the petition against the selling of live lobsters in Metro online on our web portal www.prijatelji-zivotinja.hr or at our info stall on Petar Preradovic Square this Saturday, August 12, from 10 A.M. to 2 P.M. The petition will be, together with a protest note, be sent to the representatives of Metro chain store.
We also ask for a legal ban on selling of live animals used for food in stores and chain stores and boiling of living lobsters, like this is the case in Italian district Emilia.
We invite the public not to eat lobsters in means of going vegetarian, because being vegetarian excludes eating animals, which also means not eating lobsters including compassion and care for the environment and our health. More information at can be found www.vegekit.com.
