The weekly donkey news from 'Safe Haven for Donkeys' Gaza: for many animals giving help means a relief from pain, treating injuries and transportation for the suffering people

 

View this email in your browser

Thanks to your support, donkeys, mules and horses are receiving care they would otherwise go without. Day after day, you're helping our teams reach animals working in some of the toughest conditions - bringing relief from pain, treating injuries, and giving them the chance of a healthier life. This week, we're bringing you a report from Gaza. It’s hard to overstate what your support means here. For many animals, it's the difference between ongoing suffering and the chance to heal. In January and February alone, you helped us to treat 1,262 animals in Gaza. I hope this gives you a glimpse of the incredible impact you're making. Thank you so much for your kindness.  Wendy Safe Haven UK Office An update from Gaza Our team continues to work under extremely difficult conditions, reaching animals and families who need our help. They are currently operating in Khan Yunis, where tens of thousands of displaced families are living alongside their animals in harsh and uncertain conditions. As well as Western Rafah and central Gaza, including Deir Al-Balah and surrounding areas. During January and February the team cared for over 1,262 animals. With fuel scarce and roads destroyed, donkeys have once again become the main way to transport people and goods. As prices rise and access to food becomes more difficult, many owners are struggling to care for their animals. Despite this, th transportation, e bond between people and their donkeys remains incredibly strong - built on dependence, resilience, and survival. Even during Eid, and through worsening conditions, the team has continued without pause - responding to urgent calls and bringing care to animals who would otherwise be left to suffer. The team care for a donkey and her foal. Dr Saif has shared an impact report from the field, giving a closer look at the animals cared for during January and February. Click here to see the difference you’re making. Read our report from Gaza The demand for our mobile team's services is at times overwhelming - here you can see donkeys queuing way into the distance, waiting to be examined and receive treatment. Najeeba's video message from Gaza Recently, the team responded to an urgent call from a man named Fawaz, whose donkey had been suffering from severe skin infections and deep harness wounds. When they arrived, the wounds were painful and infected. The team immediately cleaned and treated them, administered antibiotics, and began ongoing care to support recovery. They also showed Fawaz how simple changes - like adding soft padding to the harness - can help prevent this kind of suffering in future.  In her video, Najeeba shares this story - and shows you first hand how your support is helping donkey in need. Thank you. Click to view Najeeba's video Thank You  Your support helps us fund our mobile vet teams in Gaza, the West Bank, and Egypt, bringing vital veterinary treatment directly to working donkeys in desperate need. You are also helping to care for rescue donkeys at our sanctuaries in Israel and the West Bank, where they receive nutritious food, specialist care, and the safety of a forever home.  Thank you for caring for these gentle animals. Donate today Hoof abscesses, cracked hooves, joint inflammation and ligament strains are all common conditions of donkeys in Gaza. You're helping our vet team to treat hundreds of donkeys every week. If you'd like to read previous updates of our work, please click here to visit out blog. You can also view today's update online by clicking here. Registered charity number 1083468

Eight large UK fast food chains including KFC and Burger King scrapped their pledge to adopt higher animal welfare why? Not profitable: make cruelty unprofitable

 

(Beth Clifton collage)

Make Cruelty Unprofitable Again How to crack the cruelty collective action problem   Lewis Bollard the author of this article Last month, eight large UK fast food chains — including KFC, Nando’s, and Burger King — scrapped their pledges to adopt higher-welfare chicken standards under the Better Chicken Commitment. They blamed supply shortages, demand shocks, even the climate impact of the promised reforms. But suppose the reforms had been profitable. Does anyone really think these chains would have found those obstacles insurmountable? The reasons were rationalizations, not motivations. Most cruelty to farm animals today persists for one simple reason: it is profitable. That logic explains far more than the press releases do. The familiar arguments about why cages are “necessary,” mutilations are “for the animals’ benefit,” and slower-growing breeds are “impractical” speak more to the creativity of PR firms than the realities of reform. It wasn’t always this way — and it need not always be. The agricultural industrial revolution trapped farming in a cruelty collective action problem. How can we solve it? When cruelty didn’t pay For most of human history, extreme cruelty toward farm animals simply wasn’t profitable. Farmers only owned a few animals, each of whom was valuable. Without vaccines and antibiotics to keep them alive in poor conditions, good treatment was good business. Much of the ancient wisdom on animal care reflects this logic. The Old Testament extended the Sabbath to working animals, so that “your ox and your donkey may have rest.” The Roman writer Columella warned against cruelty, arguing that “excessive severity causes both men and cattle to become useless.” The Chinese agronomist Jia Sixie advised farmers: “In the heat of summer, reduce the ox’s labor; in severe cold, protect them from exposure.” This didn’t mean animals were safe from harm. In the absence of a profit motive, humans found plenty of other motives for cruelty: sport, superstition, war, gambling, fashion, tradition, or just plain fun. The Industrial Revolution initially helped. Machines replaced entire categories of animal abuse, from working horses to coal ponies. And rising prosperity created a new middle class that demanded humane reforms. The list of acceptable motivations for cruelty shrank dramatically. In the 16th century, Queen Elizabeth I hosted bear-baiting spectacles for visiting diplomats; by the 21st, Queen Elizabeth II couldn’t get away with wearing a fur coat. But this humane progress was quickly undone by further technological progress. New antibiotics, vaccines, and synthesized vitamins let farmers keep vast numbers of animals alive in wretched conditions, severing the historic link between good treatment and productivity. Rising prosperity spiked demand for meat, spurring the growth of factory farms from the 1950s on. The result is our confused reality today. Opposition to cruelty to animals is likely more widespread than it has ever been. And so is cruelty to animals. The cruelty collective action problem This confusion is also an opportunity. No one really likes factory farming. Consumers overwhelmingly disapprove of its most common practices. Small farmers resent that it has bankrupted so many of them. Even factory farmers often hate that it’s reduced them to indebted contractors. Animals presumably like it least of all. It’s easy to imagine a better system. Consumers would get products that reflect their values. Farmers would get better pay and more meaningful work — most would rather practice animal husbandry than dead animal removal. Animals would live vastly better lives. The problem isn’t imagination — it’s coordination. If one farmer unilaterally raises their standards, competitors will undercut them. But as the economist Yew-Kwang Ng has pointed out, if all producers raise standards together, profits need not fall. The industry will simply settle at a new equilibrium of slightly higher costs and prices. Would consumers be worse off? Not necessarily. It’s true that shoppers don’t always choose pricier higher-welfare products at the supermarket. But when given the chance to vote for higher welfare standards — as in California’s Prop 12 — they almost always say yes. There’s evidence that this is because consumers treat animal welfare as a public good: they’re willing to pay for it collectively, but reluctant to shoulder the cost alone while others free-ride. So we’re left with a collective action problem. A higher-welfare system could leave most parties better off, yet no individual actor has the incentive to move first. How to solve it? Stop the free rider Collective action problems have a classic villain: the free rider who refuses to reform while everyone else does, then undercuts them on price. The best fix is regulation — you can’t defect from a properly-enforced law. But domestic producers rightly object that regulations rarely apply to imports, leaving them exposed to cheap low-welfare imports. After the UK and New Zealand banned gestation crates, both watched their pork industries shrink as cheaper imports from crated pigs flooded in. Click to enlarge the chart: That makes it essential that new welfare standards apply to imports too. Despite objections from free traders, this is feasible. The EU already applies its humane slaughter standards to imported meat, and the WTO’s appellate body has ruled that animal welfare trade restrictions can be justified on moral grounds. The EU is now considering extending its long-promised cage ban to imported eggs — it’s critical that it does so. Until such legislation is in place, industry-wide agreements offer another route. Advocates recently secured one from the Norwegian poultry industry, which collectively agreed to adopt higher-welfare breeds and phase out the killing of male chicks. When everyone moves at once, no one is disadvantaged. Corporate campaigns offer yet another lever. When supermarkets and fast food chains set welfare standards, those standards apply equally to all suppliers, including importers. But these companies face their own collective action problem: no one wants to move first and be undercut by lower-welfare rivals. Advocates can break this deadlock by targeting corporate free riders. That’s the logic behind the recently victorious campaign against Ahold Delhaize, the fourth-largest US supermarket owner. Ahold had backtracked on its cage-free pledge, undercutting rivals like Costco who had made good on theirs. Now that advocates have secured concrete implementation plans from Ahold, it cracks open the logjam for its competitors to follow suit. Make the right option cheaper Advocates have raised the cost of cruelty through these campaigns, and will continue to do so. They’re also increasingly eroding cruelty’s advantage from the other direction: by making humane alternatives cheaper. In-ovo sexing is the poster child of this approach. Decades of advocacy against killing male chicks had gained little traction because producers saw no viable alternative. Then innovators developed technologies that detect an embryo’s sex early in incubation, allowing hatcheries to avoid hatching male chicks altogether. Governments in France, Germany, the US, Netherlands and Japan — along with philanthropies, including ours — funded work to bring down costs. That made it possible for half a dozen European countries to phase out chick killing, progress that has already spared over 175 million chicks from being born and killed. Click to enlarge chart Other humane technologies are ready to scale. Immunocastration can replace the castration of piglets. Sexed semen can prevent the birth of unwanted male dairy calves. Controlled atmospheric stunning can eliminate the shackling and hoisting of chickens at slaughter. Advocates and innovators are now scouting the next wave of such technologies — and AI could significantly accelerate their adoption. Government subsidies can help too. The UK and Italy are subsidizing cage-free housing conversions, France is funding in-ovo sexing adoption, and Denmark is supporting alternatives to tail-cutting in pigs. But these are modest programs. What’s needed is investment at the scale of Germany’s promised (but still undelivered) €1.5 billion per year for higher welfare housing conversions. The cruelty collective action problem is not some immovable feature of modern agriculture. It was created by technology, economics, and policy — and it can be unwound by them too. The tools are already in hand: regulations that extend to imports, targeted corporate campaigns, industry-wide agreements, humane technologies, and public subsidies. The UK fast food chains that abandoned their welfare pledges last month did so because cruelty was still the profitable choice. Our job is to make sure that calculation doesn’t hold for much longer.   Like Comment Restack   © 2026 Lewis Bollard 182 Howard Street, San Francisco, CA, 94105 Unsubscribe

A preventable tragedy left two bear cubs orphaned after their mother bear was euthanized by officials in California

 

Gorgeous little twin cubs 

A preventable tragedy left two bear cubs orphaned, but hope remains. After their mother, Blondie, was killed in Monrovia, California, her young cubs were rescued and are now receiving specialized care at San Diego Humane Society’s Ramona Wildlife Center.

On Saturday, March 14, Blondie swiped at a woman walking her dog, instinctive behavior to protect her newborn cubs, who were sheltering in a den beneath a nearby home. The woman sustained minor injuries, while her dog was unharmed.

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) captured Blondie and her two cubs on Sunday after they were found hiding beneath a house. DNA testing confirmed that Blondie had been involved in a previous human-bear encounter in the neighborhood in 2025, leading officials to make the difficult decision to euthanize her.

After being taken in, the cubs were transported to the Ramona Wildlife Center, a facility equipped to care for native wildlife requiring rehabilitation. According to the San Diego Humane Society, the cubs are being raised with minimal human interaction to preserve their natural behaviors, an essential step for any potential future release back into the wild.

“We are doing everything we can to give them the best possible shot at returning to their wild home,” stated Autumn Welch, Wildlife Operations Manager at San Diego Humane Society’s Ramona Wildlife Center.

Staff are providing round-the-clock monitoring, proper nutrition, and environmental enrichment to support the cubs’ development. Because young bears rely heavily on their mothers for survival skills, rehabilitation is expected to be a long-term process.

Though Blondie’s life ended tragically, her cubs will grow up guided by the same protective instincts she fought to preserve. With proper care, they may one day return to the wild, carrying forward her legacy.

As development pushes further into natural habitats, wildlife is increasingly forced into spaces shared with humans. Blondie’s story highlights the delicate balance animals must navigate to survive in these changing environments.

Peace 4 Animals noted that cases like this highlight the importance of preventing human-wildlife conflict, including precautions such as keeping dogs leashed and securing attractants. The organization emphasized that animals defending their young should never be killed for simply being wild.

A ban on greyhound racing in Wales and Scotland: 123 greyhounds died on the track and 3,809 injuries were recorded in Great Britain in 2024

The use of cocaine to make the dogs run faster, and the betting on the dogs at the races, ruining human lives, are according to insiders also reasons to ban greyhound racing ( I have no proof to write about these allegations )

In a historic win for animal welfare, Wales has moved to ban greyhound racing following a decisive vote in the Senedd, while Scotland has passed legislation outlawing the sport altogether.

Photo: BBC

According to the League Against Cruel Sports, in 2024, there were 123 greyhound fatalities recorded at licensed tracks in Great Britain, and 3,809 injuries were reported to racing greyhounds.

Photo: Greyhound racing Scotland

Since 2017, the industry has recorded hundreds of deaths each year and thousands of injuries: at least 1,357 trackside fatalities and more than 35,000 injuries over that period.

On March 17, 2026, members of the Welsh Senedd voted 39 to 10 in favor of the Prohibition of Greyhound Racing (Wales) Bill, which will make it illegal to operate greyhound racing venues or organize races in the country.

Greyhound Racing Scotland

The ban is expected to be implemented in stages between April 2027 and April 2030. Wales currently has only one active track, Valley Greyhound Stadium in Ystrad Mynach.

Animal welfare groups hailed the vote as a major victory for greyhounds. Jamie Adair of the League Against Cruel Sports stated:

“The death and injury toll of greyhound racing is quite simply shocking, and goes beyond what people see at the racetracks.”

Welsh Democrat Jane Dodds, a supporter of the bill, added that it sends a clear message:

“Foreseeable and unavoidable harm to animals cannot be justified in the name of sport or in the service of gambling revenues.”

Despite some legal challenges and criticism, supporters say the legislation is a historic step toward protecting greyhounds from unnecessary harm.

The following day, on March 18, 2026, the Scottish Parliament voted to pass the Greyhound Racing (Offences) (Scotland) Bill, effectively banning greyhound racing in Scotland. The bill, introduced by Green MSP Mark Russell, makes it illegal for greyhounds to race on oval tracks, with penalties including fines and up to five years in prison. During debate, Russell told MSPs:

“Racing greyhounds at up to speeds of 40 pmh around an oval track results in catastrophic injuries and deaths. Dogs break their legs, break their backs, end up paralysed and with serious head trauma.”

Scotland’s last remaining track, Thornton Stadium in Kirkcaldy, Fife, closed in 2025, leaving the country without active racing venues. Supporters say the legislation prevents future harm and aligns Scotland with other countries that have already outlawed the cruel sport.

In recent years, the industry has sharply declined. Advocates point to injury data and the number of greyhounds killed to highlight the risks faced by racing dogs. The back-to-back actions in Wales and Scotland mark a historic moment for animal welfare, signaling that the UK is moving to end greyhound racing and protect dogs from avoidable harm, another historic win for animal welfare.

Just arrived Sea Shepherd video episode 7 with the latest news 'World Krill Crisis' ( what is krill ? )

https://www.seashepherdglobal.org/latest-news/

More videos taken in 2026 

As the mission continues, the crew move further into Antarctic waters and begin to see a different side of the region. What seems remote and untouched quickly proves more complex.

In this episode, the team heads out on the small boats and comes across activity that puts the scale of what’s happening here into perspective. It’s a clear reminder that even this part of the world is far from isolated. What they observe raises important questions about how these waters are being used — and what that means going forward

Sea Shepherd is an international, non-profit marine conservation organization that engages in direct action campaigns to defend wildlife, and conserve and protect the world’s oceans from illegal exploitation and environmental destruction.

What is Kril?

https://voordierenblogger.blogspot.com/2026/03/sea-shepherd-face-to-face-with.html Learn more about us: https://seashe.ph/aboutus Support our efforts: https://seashe.ph/supportdonate Shop to support: https://seashe.ph/eotwshop