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Here are animals who’ve had some of the worst jobs!
10 - 100% Real?
Okay, we know that the guys over in Saudi Arabia have a bit of extra cash.
We also know that they like to spend it.
And sometimes, it’s in weird ways.
Such as by having a camel beauty pageant!
In 2018, the King Abdulaziz Camel Festival had its annual camel beauty pageant.
However, the event in 2018 will be remembered because of a scandal.
Since winning first place in the pageant comes with a prize of a bit more than $5 million
USD, some owners were tempted to cheat.
And how do you cheat in a camel beauty pageant?
Apparently, it’s with Botox!
Twelve camels were disqualified from the beauty contest because they received botox injections
that made their pouts look more alluring.
Camels were also given injections for the lips, the nose, and even the jaw!
The key attributes in camel beauty are considered to be their delicate ears and a big nose.
But there are strict rules against the use of drugs in the lips or shaved or clipped
body parts to make camels prettier.
It’s tough out there for a camel!
Hey, do us a quick favor, and hit that like button!
9 - Harvesting monkeys Thailand has been raising and training pigtailed
macaques to pick coconuts for over 400 years.
Coconut farmers in Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and other countries in the region sometimes rely
on the monkeys too.
But why monkeys to pick coconuts?
Well, a male monkey can collect an average of sixteen hundred coconuts per day while
a female can get around six hundred!
How many can a human pick?
Around 80 per day!
I’m sure you guys can figure out the advantages for a monkey.
It's also safer for a scampering, height-savvy monkey than for a human to pluck and drop
coconuts from trees that grow up to 80 feet tall.
Probably the worst part is that farmers take the monkeys from the wild, keep them tethered,
and keep them that way their entire life.
Basically, these monkeys spend their whole lives on a leash.
Apparently, some monkey trainers from Thailand stated that monkeys pick approximately 99
percent of the Thai coconuts sold!
Even if that figure is something like 50%, it’s still a tough job and life for any
monkey!
8 - Zebra actors In case you’ve never heard of zebra impersonators,
well, now you have.
In 2009, Gaza zookeepers disguised donkeys as zebras!
The zoo painted two white donkeys with stripes in order to replace the two zebras that passed
of starvation earlier in the year during the Israel-Hamas war.
Israel restricts the importing of animals into Gaza, so the Marah Land Zoo’s zookeepers
covered a pair of donkeys in black and white stripes instead!
Mohammed Bargouthi, the owner of the zoo, said it would have cost over $40,000 USD to
smuggle a real zebra into Gaza.
So, instead, he used French-manufactured hair dye on the donkeys.
His son, Nidal, said the two female donkeys were striped using masking tape and hair dye,
applied with a paintbrush.
Apparently, their first attempt didn’t go too well because they tried using regular
paint and it just looked like well….donkeys with paint on them.
However, the hair dye did the trick and the kids couldn’t tell a difference anymore
so they called the donkeys zebras and it was a win win for everyone.
7 - Circus life Circus animals don’t exactly have the time
of their lives by performing for a circus instead of roaming free in the wild.
The proof of that is the story about Anne, the last circus elephant in the UK.
When Anne got to Britain, she was about four years old, which puts her in her 60s now.
In the Fifties and Sixties, circuses were popular and Anne was a big star.
However, in recent years, something seemed off even though Anne was officially retired
and no longer did performances.
To prove that she wasn’t getting the right treatment, an investigator secretly installed
a tiny video camera in the wall of Anne’s barn in January 2011.
The recordings were surprising and shocking.
Anne was almost never unchained and she didn’t go outside at all.
As if that weren’t enough, Anne’s keeper was hitting her daily for no reason!
Over the space of three weeks filming, he hit her and kicked her, among other abuse.
Eighteen months after the story was made public, the circus owner was found guilty of animal
cruelty, and he was given a conditional discharge, with no fine.
However, just to be clear, it was the handler who did the misdeeds, not the owner.
Anne was rescued from the circus and brought to live in a safari park in the UK.
At first, vets feared she was so badly traumatized that they would have no choice but to put
her down.
But Anne proved to be tough enough to keep going, and apparently, she now lives a happy
retirement with three other goats who keep her company!
6 - Bean producers Have you guys ever heard of Kopi luwak?
It’s coffee made from coffee beans that’s been digested by a civet!
Their digestive enzymes change the structure of proteins in the coffee beans, removing
some of the acidity, making for a smoother cup of coffee.
But as demand for kopi luwak keeps rising, the worse the civets are being treated!
Researchers assessed the living conditions of nearly 50 wild civets held in cages at
16 plantations on Bali.
The results, which were published in the journal Animal Welfare, aren’t pretty.
Some of the civets were very thin, because of being fed a restricted diet of only coffee
cherries, the fruit that surrounds the coffee bean.
Some civets were obese, apparently because they’re not able to move around freely.
And some of them were hopped up on caffeine!
Additionally, many of the civets didn’t have access to clean water and didn’t have
opportunities to interact with other civets.
They were also exposed to daytime noise from traffic and tourists, which is particularly
disturbing for these nocturnal animals.
There’s no way right now how to tell whether a bag of kopi luwak was made from wild or
caged civets.
The only way to know for sure is to visit the farm to see the conditions, and buy the
coffee right there!
5 - Bullfighting in Spain You guys knew that bullfighting would show
up on this list right?
Bullfighting is a national sport and still a popular event in Spain.
Bullfights take place in large outdoor arenas known as plaza de toros, or a bullring.
The outcome of a bullfight is almost always the same.
The bull goes by the hand of the Matador.
It’s only on those rare occasions when a bull shows exceptional skill and will that
the bull is pardoned and lives the rest of its life back on a ranch.
Obviously, animal-rights activists consider bullfighting to be a barbaric tradition.
However, other people argue that the life of a fighting bull has advantages over the
life of a cow or steer raised for beef production.
The bulls in bullfighting are in the ring for only a short time, anywhere from 20-30
minutes.
For the rest of the time, they and the rest of their breed are able to enjoy all the pleasures
and privileges possible for cattle, roaming free in their natural environment.
Whether that life is a better tradeoff between the life of regular cattle is definitely a
discussion up for debate!
4 - Canary in the coal mine Up until a few decades ago, miners really
did use canaries as a way to detect harmful gases whenever they went deep into mines.
That’s how the expression, “canary in the coal mine” came to be.
Thankfully back in 1986, that was largely put to rest.
Birds were phased out of service as modern carbon monoxide detectors were phased in.
The practice was first suggested by Scottish scientist John Haldane, known as the Father
of Oxygen Therapy.
Canaries were first used because their anatomy requires much more oxygen than we do, and
that makes them more sensitive to toxic gases such as methane and carbon monoxide, both
of which have no color, odor or taste.
Carbon monoxide is produced through combustion and typically dissipates in the air but is
dangerous in a confined space such as a mine.
In the past, canaries reacted quickly to the gas, warning miners visually by fainting and
audibly by no longer chirping.
Miners evacuated the pits and mineshafts for safety and revived their canaries to use again
if they didn’t already pass.
Some miners even carried small oxygen vials to revive their birds before returning to
the surface!
Even if a miner did do that, it’s still a tough job for a bird nonetheless!
3 - Mom Pigs A gestation crate, also known as a sow stall,
is a metal enclosure, in which a female breeding pig, or a sow, is kept during pregnancy and
after giving birth in order to keep her piglets “safe” in a small space setting.
Since the space is so small, it kind of defeats the purpose, as mother pigs have a bigger
chance of accidentally stepping on or laying on their babies!
Sow stalls contain no bedding material and are instead floored with slatted plastic or
metal to allow waste to be efficiently collected below.
A few days before giving birth, sows are moved to farrowing crates where they’re able to
lie down, with an attached crate from which their piglets can nurse.
In 2016, out of a total 50.1 million pigs in the US, there were 5.36 million breeding
sows.
Most of the pregnant sows in the US are kept in gestation crates.
Opponents of the crates argue that they constitute animal abuse, while proponents say they’re
needed to prevent sows from fighting among themselves.
2 - It’s all artificial The world consumes a lot of beef and milk,
and to get as many healthy animals as we need, we can't just rely naturally a bull and a
cow to create little ones.
This means that there’s going to be some human help involved.
That also means that someone has to be inside the artificial mount to help "facilitate"
the ahem, “deposit”, by making sure it lands in the appropriate receptacle!
Since bulls have a higher chance of getting injured with metal or wooden mounts than when
they do it with cows, farmers manipulate the bulls.
They essentially have to collect the sample themselves by using artificial cow lady parts.
And unfortunately for the bull, they don’t use a cow.
Actually it’s probably bad for all parties involved.
Instead, farmers use steers, bulls that have been neutered!
If they don't see anything dangling, most bulls don't notice the difference and they’re
happy to mount the steer.
As soon as the bull mounts the steer, whoever is collecting the sample sheaths the bull’s
um….excited part in a soft, lubed-up plastic tube and bam.
We’ve got some extra hamburgers on the way in a few years!
Who’s got it worse, the steer or the bull?!
Let us know in the comments!
1 - Chicken or the egg Battery cages are small wire cages where about
95 percent of laying hens spend their entire lives.
Each hen is given about 70 square inches of space.
To get a sense of a hen’s life in a battery cage, imagine spending your entire life in
a wire cage the size of your bathtub with four other people.
You wouldn’t be able to move, so your muscles and bones would deteriorate.
Your feet become lacerated.
Essentially, you would go insane.
That’s precisely what happens to laying hens.
The lack of space isn’t the only problem here.
In battery cages, chickens never perch, forage, take a dust bath, nest, or explore their surroundings,
as chickens usually like to do.
In the United States, roughly nine billion chickens, pigs, and other farm animals are
consumed annually.
The vast majority of them are subject to treatment that would count as a crime if it were done
to dogs or cats.
Maybe one day we’ll have a solution for the chicken we want to eat but also have humane
treatment to raise the chickens.
Here’s what’s next!