ARUKAH ANIMAL INTERNATIONAL

Miracles Amid Chaos: The Lives You've Changed

A Russian airstrike set off a conflagration in the upper floor of a home, in Kherson, Ukraine, across from Russian-occupied territory, belonging to a wonderful, caring man who had started to take in abandoned, starving, and desperate cats with nowhere to go. As the invasion became more dire, and escaping families were not able to take their animal companions with them, the man helped more and more of the wandering and bewildered cats until the number reached over 60.  While the conditions in the house were not perfect, at least they now had shelter and food, as there was no actual shelter in the area with the capacity to bring in additional cats.

 

Tragically, the fire that engulfed the top floor killed nearly all the cats, with three surviving, among them a very fortunate ginger cat called Natasha, who had a dream ending, assuaging some of the terrible anguish and piercing sorrow of the deaths.

 

Through our extraordinarily generous donors, Arukah helps such long-term Ukrainian partners as Anna Kurkurina with veterinary treatment, pet food, and spay/neuter surgeries. It was Anna who rescued the severely burned and traumatized Natasha. Once fully recovered, the beautiful kitty landed in a perfect home fit for the lucky girl, rich with an assortment of toys, divine beds, and endlessly pleasurable cuddling.


 

Thanks to the constancy of Arukah donors, thousands of dogs and cats caught in a country convulsed with chaos and violence have experienced many astonishing miracles. Let them continue. Together, we can create a future where every animal, no matter where they come from, can find safety, love, and a joyful forever home.

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The Canary Islands Biosphere Under Threat

 

Nueva Pescanova (NP) is Spain’s global seafood company. Its planned octopus farm, on Gran Canaria, the largest island of the Canary Islands, is anything but a solution to the damning problems in the biozone that it is centrally involved in creating. In fact, it would have calamitous repercussions for the already stressed local environment, without even considering the fish and crustaceans required to feed a million octopus a year for industrial farming.

 

The Decline Of The Oceans

 

Nueva Pescanova’s egregious self-promoting as being an environmentally sustainable and responsible corporation couldn’t be further from the truth. With its unethical status in the seafood industry, NP has somehow astonishingly been celebrated, even being listed on the Seafood Stewardship Index as "the most sustainable and responsible fishing company in Spain and the second in the global seafood sector." The company’s Website claims that NP is committed to “maintaining biodiversity,” “protecting the ecosystem” and “promoting the circular economy. while these stared objectives run contrary to, and are incompatible with, the firm's own actions. Ocean and sea life is under threat throughout the world. The WWF Living Blue Planet Report found that over the last four decades, sea fish populations have declined on average by 50%. Some species extracted for consumption including tunas, mackerels, and bonitos, have declined by a full 74%.

The WWF report states that the principal reasons for this decline are a global rise in water temperatures and increasing acidity levels sparked by ever higher percentages of carbon dioxide in the oceans. The primary threat, though, is extraction overexploitation. These issues are especially severe in the Mediterranean, where according to the WWF, 93% of fish populations are assessed as being overexploited, as opposed 29% globally. Declines are especially acute in Spanish waters. In 2021, the NGO Oceana Europe released research that highlighted sea floor trawler fishing to be a major threat taking an especially high toll. Their data indicates the trawling exploitation is almost 8.74 times more intensive than average rates in European waters. While NP is the most significant contributor to the overexploitation of fish in the region, simultaneously seeking to expand its fishing grounds, the firm proposes that “the proliferation of its aquafarms will reduce pressure on ocean populations.” Aquafarms rely on live species fresh from oceans to feed their exploited marine life, whom NP sees as its product. Aquafarms are notoriously harmful to surrounding bodies of water because of the constant flow of exchange of pathogen-laden waters of aquafarms back into the ocean.

 

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Eric with his dapper cat, Maxwell.

 

Arukah is delighted to welcome the inimitable 

Eric Kleiman to our board!

 

After 30 years in the animal protection field, I have been reassessing what I’ve done and learned. One of my most important lessons is that mistakes are not the end of the world and can lead to surprising outcomes. I learned that firsthand from my participation in a front-page article in the New York Times.

 

In 1997, at In Defense of Animals, I was directing the campaign against the Coulston Foundation (CF), which was then the world’s largest chimp lab. Whistleblowers had informed me of the negligent death of a chimp named Jello, whose trachea was full of food at necropsy—indicating he had not been properly fasted. We went public with his death, and CF issued a statement to media, including the New York Times, which was doing a story about chimps in research. CF said we were wrong, that Jello’s death was caused by a cagemate who stepped on his neck. This was new information; group anesthesia in the absence of an emergency is a violation of the Animal Welfare Act. We subsequently filed new complaints with the USDA—which enforces the AWA— based on this new information.

 

Unfortunately, I stupidly told the New York Times reporter that I had never seen a chimp—and he duly reported that, “Indeed, Mr. Kleiman concedes, he has never seen a chimp in the flesh.” This was so much worse because he was writing specifically about Jello’s death. That played into the arguments from the likes of CF and other chimp experimenters that animal advocates didn’t know what we were doing. I felt like a complete idiot. Making a mistake is one thing; making it in a front-page article in the New York Times is something else.

 

Despite this, the eventual outcome was great. The USDA filed a formal complaint against CF the following year for the negligent deaths of Jello and another chimp named Echo. The USDA vindicated our information, charging CF with not fasting Jello adequately prior to sedation (that’s why there was food in his trachea), and negligently anesthetizing chimps in a group—a fact that we did not know before the New York Times (and other media) published the story. 

 

 

Moreover, CF was so obstructive with the USDA—including blatant discrepancies between what it told the New York Times and other media, and what it told the USDA—that the agency issued CF a subpoena. This was an extremely rare occurrence and put the lab on the USDA’s radar. CF had to deal with substantially heightened regulatory scrutiny because of its negligence and obstructive behavior—behavior that would not have come to light without that New York Times story. The situation was so serious that the USDA’s investigator wanted to interview the New York Times reporter, while a reporter for the Associated Press—a friend of CF’s PR director—told her the department would need a subpoena before he would disclose information.

 

In retrospect, I believe that Jello’s death was the beginning of the end of the Coulston Foundation, for these very reasons—and the New York Times story played a crucial role, regardless of my stupidity. The campaign I directed eventually shuttered CF, which was forced to donate over 300 chimps and monkeys to Save the Chimps, the world’s largest private chimp sanctuary.

 

Just a few months after the New York Times article, there was a national meeting regarding the Air Force chimpanzees (which I was also heavily involved with, and I believe had put the entire issue of chimps in research on the map). At that meeting, CF’s president tried to embarrass me in front of all the animal groups and researchers present, asking, “Hey Eric, have you still not seen a chimp?” I, of course, felt foolish. But then, Carole Noon, the incomparable advocate and visionary with whom I worked closely and who founded Save the Chimps and rescued those hundreds of chimps and monkeys from CF, said, “Maybe not, but he knows how to read a USDA inspection report.” And then she dropped her mic.

 

So, mistakes are not the end of the world and can lead to wonderful results. In my experience, we learn by doing, and mistakes are an inevitable part of that.

 

With heartfelt gratitude, 

Robin Dorman 

President and Executive Director  

P.S. Your support makes all the difference, and a profound one at that, in helping to create awareness about the terrible cruelty and catastrophic effects of factory farming.


 

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Arukah means Healing, Restoring, and Repairing 

 

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