It's the New Year! How great to be able to get DawnWatch rolling with two terrific animal stories that aired over the first weekend of 2009. The CBS Evening News on Friday, January 2, included a lovely story on a sweet interspecies friendship at the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee. San Francisco's ABC affiliate did a strong story on hens and eggs.
The CBS story tells us that at the Elephant Sanctuary every elephant has a best friend, generally of the same species, but Tarra's best friend is a dog named Bella. The segment includes gorgeous video of the two romping together and also touching stories about their relationship. You'll find it on line at http://tinyurl.com/8v2bza
I was unable, on my computer, to get sound with the video even though the advertisement sound played perfectly (of course!). You might have the same problem but the text of the story is there on the same page so you can easily work out what's going on, and it is lovely to watch.
Though this is hardly a hard-hitting animal issues story, it gives great publicity to the wonderful Elephant Sanctuary (www.Elephants.com ) and watching the elephants wander happily over hundreds of acres might subtly help viewers rethink zoos and circuses. So it is a great idea for animal advocates to thank CBS for the story. Positive feedback for animal stories encourages more of them. You can comment right on that web page, and CBS will be glad to see a strong response. Or you can send a note to evening@cbsnews.com
I send thanks to Bryce for making sure we saw the piece.
People who have been receiving DawnWatch over the years have seen many a wonderful animal story come from reporter Dan Noyes at San Francisco's ABC-7. How nice to learn that he is not the only one at the station looking at those issues! As Dan anchors the news show on Friday, reporter Dan Ashley brings us a report, written and produced by Ken Miguel, about "Urban Chickens." It tells us about people who choose to raise hens in their backyards instead of heading to supermarkets to get their eggs.
The piece begins as a lighthearted fluffy piece showing the joy of having chickens. Such pieces always worry me slightly as they tacitly suggest that this is the cruelty free alternative to factory farming; unfortunately it isn't entirely cruelty free as truly bad things happen to the male offspring of the hens that are bred for eggs. Yet the hens themselves seem to do well in the backyard, and this system is incomparably kinder than most as it avoids keeping any animal in a battery cage for years. Moreover the story presented the hens as animals as opposed to egg-laying objects. We are told that those who have chickens say they make great pets, and we see a young girl smiling gleefully as she holds and gently pets a contented looking chicken.
Most importantly, while the story could have just been a fun piece about "Urban Chickens," the ABC-7 team chose to include some shocking video of factory farming and commercial slaughter. We are taken inside a hellish looking battery-cage egg-laying hen shed. We are also shown video, from the recent Chino slaughterhouse undercover investigation, of an injured dairy cow being shoved along the ground with a forklift towards slaughter.
The reporter tells us, "Images taken by many animal activists expose large-scale factory farms and the mistreatment of animals. The videos have led some people to be more concerned about where their food comes from."
Susan Anderson, who is one of the people raising backyard hens, says, "I was little worried about where our food was coming from, I wanted to know... I think that bit where they were pushing the cows over with the bulldozer just totally got me."
The piece therefore used warm backyard animal images as it invited people to watch, then packed an unexpected strong punch against factory farming and the commercial treatment of animals raised for food. You'll find it on line at http://tinyurl.com/8vqb7t
Please thank ABC-7. You can comment at the bottom of the web page and have your comment widely read by other viewers. And please send an appreciative comment directly to the news team at http://tinyurl.com/4ca4b7
Choose the first option from the pull-down menu to send your comment to ABC-7 News.
Happy New Year!
Yours and the animals',
Karen Dawn
(DawnWatch is an animal advocacy media watch that looks at animal issues in the media and facilitates one-click responses to the relevant media outlets. You can learn more about it, and sign up for alerts at http://www.DawnWatch.com. You may forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts if you do so unedited -- leave DawnWatch in the title and include this parenthesized tag line. If somebody forwards DawnWatch alerts to you, which you enjoy, please help the list grow by signing up. It is free.)
Please go to http://tinyurl.com/9mve9r if you would like to see an NBC news piece on Karen Dawn's new book, "Thanking the Monkey: Rethinking the Way we Treat Animals.”
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Date: Mon Jan 5 00:14:57 2009
