Some personal photography and important thoughts.

Tuesday, 19 February 2013

The fur industry

Did you realise that more and more fur is currently creeping into many UK stores, including Burberry and Harrods. Any real fur comes from tortured animals bred solely for their fur and born to die in tiny cages or from wild animals trapped in a steel bear trap, if they don't die or chew off a limb to escape and then die from loss of blood, they will be cruelly killed, by strangulation, crushing or drowning. These animals include minks, lynx', wolves, coyotes, foxes, rabbits, beavers, squirrels, racoons, chinchillas, raccoon dogs, seals, cats and dogs. Yes, domesticated cats and dogs. It is just as likely that real fur in any UK shop has come from a domesticated animal than a wild animal. Does this make it worse?
No. No matter what the animal, this is evil, cruel and disgusting. All for what? Fashion.

The skin of a tortured, dead, defenceless animal is what we call fashion.

More than 50 million animals are killed a year for their fur, for 'fashion', this number does not even include rabbits.

If you come across real fur in a UK store, it will often be mislabelled, even as 'faux fur'. However, there are ways to tell if the fur is real or fake:

From worldanimal.net

http://www.infurmation.com/index.php/information/videos
www.caft.org.uk
www.furkills.org

We can stop this.
Please join myself and many others in boycotting any stores that sell real fur until they issue a formal statement saying that they no longer will.
Write to the stores and express your views on the issue.
If you do not know for sure whether the fur is real or fake, don't risk the purchase. (Remember, companies can and will label real fur as 'faux fur'.)
Do not buy real fur from anywhere, ebay, amazon, your favourite shop etc.

This is the only way to put an end to The Bloody Fur Industry.

Tuesday, 5 February 2013

Pittville Park

So, the first thing that anyone will know about me is that I really like birds. I have a few bird related tattoos and countless bird decor and imagery surrounding my life. Why do I like them so much? Basically, everybody wants freedom, right? And birds have just that. Plus, they're strong, independent and I hear they survived the ice age. From a photographer's point of view they make lovely photos as well as being unpredictable and a bit of a challenge to photograph.
I went to Pittville park to feed the ducks today and decided to get some shots of primarily in-flight seagulls. Enjoy!

Tuesday, 29 January 2013

Day 2 of work experience

Same old, same old...
Here's some more photos:

Various Animal Rights Demos

Anti-fur demo in Manchester (29/12/12)

'Blood On Your Hands' demo, outside Newcastle University (10/01/13)

Anti Greyhound-Racing outside Perry Barr, Birmingham (11/01/13)

Save The Harlan Beagles Vigil in Bristol (19/01/13)

Monday, 28 January 2013

Work Experience at The Gloucestershire Echo

Today was my first day of work experience at The Gloucestershire Echo. I have to admit, I wasn't incredibly excited for it - Newspaper work isn't really my ambition, but I was pleasantly surprised. I started off the day by shadowing and working with Paul Nicholls (www.paulnichollsphotography.co.uk). Although we didn't go to any big news stories, it was still fast-paced which is something I enjoy. In the afternoon, the photographers for the newspaper were all out and about in different cities in Gloucestershire, Carey wasn't sure how I'd get back so didn't want to send me, so instead I was sent out to take some 'arty' pictures around Cheltenham for a spread in the paper. Now, I'm not really one to search for the perfect 'arty' shot, I much prefer to take photographs that have a lot of meaning behind them or show something important and I do find it near on impossible to find something in Cheltenham that interests me. However, as you can probably tell from this blog, I do have a huge soft spot for animals - any animals. Whilst everyone else seems to be complaining about 'bloody pigeons' and 'squirrels stealing food from the birds', I'm admiring them. So, instead of photographing something that just isn't me, I befriended some animals and got some 'arty' shots of them. And now, I will share them with you:

Monday, 14 January 2013

Please help to save the Harlan beagles.

"SAVE THE HARLAN BEAGLES is a campaign to close Harlan UK – the country’s last remaining breeders of beagles for use in vivisection."

"Lab animals will have chemicals dripped into their eyes, be force fed capsules and have liquids pumped directly into their stomachs via plastic tubes. Side effects of such experiments include vomiting, internal bleeding, seizures, paralysis and, finally, death. Most lab animals will be experimented on several times before dying"

"Vioxx – a drug designed to ease the pain of arthritis sufferers – improved animal heart health (and was tested ‘safe’ on monkeys), but went on to cause over 140,000 fatal heart attacks and strokes in humans"

"Humans share 98% of their DNA with chimpanzees. However, chimps are immune to HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis B and common Malaria. The latter kills millions of humans every year. Therefore, the 2% DNA difference is HUGE"

"The results of drug testing may be different on male rats and male Beagle dogs compared with females, due to differences in liver function in males and females (23, 24). That makes animal testing even less reliable than tossing a coin."

"Animals are similar to people. But how scientific is the word “similar” when one considers that humans share 50 percent of their DNA with a banana?"

Please visit the website for more information:
http://savetheharlanbeagles.com/

And don't forget to sign the petition:
http://www.change.org/petitions/save-the-harlan-beagles?utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=url_share&utm_campaign=url_share_after_sign

Sunday, 13 January 2013

Animal Testing

After attending the Newcastle University Animal Lab demo, as planned, I was intrigued to find out more about animal testing in the name of science, research and cosmetics. I personally cannot find myself to support it, even in cases such as 'Cancer Research UK', 'Parkinson's UK' and 'The British Heart Foundation'. This may seem controversial and ignorant on my part, but I will never agree that testing on animals is the only or best way to find out more about any illness or find a prevention or cure. I feel that animals deserve a lot more rights than they have, one of which should be to never be subjected to such cruelty or torture especially when it is so in vain. Even if we did not test on humans for humans, with todays science we can create artificial (and very realistic) skin, stem cells and so much more. Cruelty to animals is cheaper and far less reliable.

List of charities which do fund or conduct experiments on animals:

http://www.animalaid.org.uk/images/pdf/factfiles/HealthCharities.pdf

Whilst it is not legal to test on animals for cosmetics in the UK, it is not illegal for the products to be tested outside of the UK but still sold in the UK.

List of some of the companies that test on animals:

http://www.thevegetariansite.com/ethics_test.htm

'Save The Harlan Beagles': This is a campaign aiming to stop beagles being bred for medical science and vivisection. These dogs are bred purely for sickening and torturous experiments.

http://savetheharlanbeagles.com/

I definitely plan to attend some demos and protests for this cause.

http://www.animalaid.org.uk/h/n/AA/HOME/