Warning: World Wildlife Fund is No Animal Protection Group

[Rosemary]

Just emailed this news release to Toronto media.


Freedom for Animals
PO Box 418, 704 Spadina Ave.Toronto, ON M5S 2S9, Canada 416-591-5120 info@freeanimals.org
http://freeanimals.org
For immediate release

April 21, 2003


The World Wildlife Fund
Is No Animal Protection Organization
WWF Advertising is Misleading, Animal Rights Group Charges
TORONTO -- In response to pleas to "Save Wildlife", many animal lovers in Toronto are preparing to participate in the CN Tower Climb fundraiser for the World Wildlife Fund of Canada, scheduled for April 24 and 26. What many of them may not know is that the World Wildlife Fund of Canada supports hunting, the seal hunt, and even whaling.

Hidden on a section of their website aimed at Nunavut, the World Wildlife Fund of Canada states, "What WWF is Not! WWF is not an animal welfare organization. We support the hunting and consumption of wild animals" (http://www.wwfcanada.org/satellite/n...age1_eng.html, emphasis added).

This is a startling admission from a group which is registered as an "animal protection" charity with Canada Customs and Revenue Agency.

Freedom for Animals urges concerned people considering donating to the World Wildlife Fund or other wildlife charities to ask them for their positions on hunting and other practices that harm animals before donating.

"Logically and ethically, it makes no sense for a registered animal protection charity to support activities which cause pain, suffering, and death to animals," says Freedom for Animals spokesperson Rosemary Amey. "We feel that the World Wildlife Fund's promotional literature, which refers to 'saving wildlife', is misleading given that they are in fact in favour of slaughtering wildlife. Every donor has the right to make informed choices about which charities they support."

"Animal charities should not compromise in their defence of animals. The animals deserve nothing less than our 100% protection," says Freedom for Animals co-founder Suzanne Lahaie.

Contact:
Rosemary Amey 416-467-5732
Suzanne Lahaie 416-591-5120

Documentation for our claims about the WWF's policies is available at http://www.freeanimals.org/wwf/.

-30-

[Lacykitten]

There's a similar thing going on here in Calgary with the Calgary Tower. I know that WWF isn't that great but until now didn't really know why..

I don't get any newspapers, but I'll still write in to the editors of both. I'll also contact local AR groups about educating people on the WWF.

Thanks!

[purplemackerel]

Any animal organisation with the Prince Philip as a president cannot be an animal protection organisation.

1981-1996: HRH The Duke of Edinburgh
HRH The Duke of Edinburgh served as International President of WWF for 16 years until his retirement at the end of 1996. Now, as President Emeritus, he still works actively on behalf of the organization.

[Rosemary]

WWF also campaigns for increased animal testing. See this PETA site:
http://meangreenies.com/wwf.html

I didn't mention this in the news release because I don't (yet) have any info about WWF-Canada's animal testing policies.

[Rosemary]

http://www.nowtoronto.com/issues/200...ews_story7.php

THE ANIMAL LIB TRAP
WHY ANIMAL RIGHTS RADICALS HATE CONSERVATIONISTS
BY MIKE SMITH
Long ago, there was animal protectionism. If that wasn't enough for you, you became vegetarian and maybe let the dog sleep inside. Fast forward a few decades. Now old-school wildlife preservers, who often choose the wrong allies, and urban animal defenders, who often choose the wrong battles, are barking at each other over seals. Again.Toronto's Freedom for Animals, the group that campaigned against the tormentors of "Kensington" the cat on video, is now encouraging a boycott of this years CN Tower Climb, a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) fundraiser. The WWF, they say, registers itself as an "animal protection" charity yet supports the seal hunt in Nunavut. "The climb has been promoted as a way to help save wildlife," explains FFA member Rosemary Amey, "and the WWF supports hunting, particularly the seal hunt and whaling. This hurts wildlife."

Might Nunavut not be a bit context-sensitive? What would FFA have First Nations folk in the far north do -- just take the sled down to Noah's to pick up some miso burgers? Maybe some imitation blubber? "We don't have a Nunavut division right now," Amey chuckles, "so we haven't researched those issues." Maybe I can help. Take Toronto. Multiply its winter by 10. Take away many buildings (including Fressen and Juice for Life). Make almost everyone Inuit. Now tell them not to hunt. Oh, look, they're starving! But, hey, the seals are happy.

In our short interview, I said that if we were going to Nunavut, we would work with the people there to find solutions that would not involve killing animals. I said that if WWF promotes itself as an animal protection organization in Toronto, it can't just change into something else when it goes to Nunavut. I also said that WWF supports hunting everywhere, not just Nunavut.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm vegan(ish) myself. I just want no part of dietary colonization. "Sealing is extremely important," elaborates Carey Bonnel of the Nunavut government's Fishing and Sealing Ministry. "We live in a region of extremely limited opportunities." What would happen if the hunting were stopped? "It would have many health consequences, because meat from the hunt is very important to the diet of the Inuit people."

WWF-Canada president Monty Hummel, raised in a hunting family himself, is eager to riff on the accusations of hypocrisy. "I think if you were raised in the north of this country, on a farm or in a small coastal community you'd find (anti-seal-hunt arguments) to be (based on) strong urban-based attitudes. There's some cultural intolerance going on here."

If he had asked, Smith would have found out that I grew up on 100 acres of forest outside of a small town in eastern Ontario. Freedom for Animals co-founder is from an even smaller town in northern Ontario (and managed to become vegan while living there.)

And maybe a bit of impatience, too. By manoeuvring within the system, orgs like the WWF hope to make changes that save millions of animals. "If we don't succeed at the level where the WWF is working," Hummel says "(that of) saving the ecosystem, then the groups concerned about hunting or not hunting aren't going to have anything to argue about."

Nonetheless, both camps could learn a lot from each other. Animal rights activists are often unable or unwilling to acknowledge the cultural rift between the urban and the far-flung. In many northern communities, buying packaged foods shipped from half a world away that are unrecognizable as a plant or animal is as unthinkable as hunting is to vegetarians. It's even unthinkable to some urban ecologists who are aware that global warming results from trucking in your tofu and kills even the non-cuddly animals.

While conservationists and habitat protectors like the WWF do see the big picture of ecological degradation, as in their campaign against chemical pollutants, they tend to see eco-restoration as the way to maintain a resource they very much wish to keep using. Animal rights organizations, on the other hand, traditionally haven't shown up much in environmental showdowns around logging or contamination.

If he had asked, which he didn't, he would have found that Freedom for Animals has been involved in environmental activism, e.g. around the so-called "Lands for Life" program.

But they are skilled at reminding us of the suffering of animals lost in this paved-over society, particularly pets and animals tortured in factory farming. And they challenge us to think of all living things as our equals, partners in a shared biosphere.

If they could only tone down the "Don't let the natives eat" thing they might be taken a bit more seriously when they point out some of the old guard's transgressions.

Of course, no one ever said, "Don't let the natives eat".

I wonder, for example, what Nigeria's rural communities think of the WWF's decision to nominate Shell Canada for BC's Minister's Environmental Award for donating thousands of acres of oil drilling rights to the Nature Conservancy. Shell certainly didn't do that in Nigeria. In fact, it imported weapons for paramilitaries to keep down enviro activists. And why is the WWF involved in the U.S Environmental Protection Agency's "endocrine disruptor screening program," which exposes thousands of lab animals to toxins?

Hummel insists that the WWF simply worked with the EPA to make sure testing on "specimens" is kept to a "minimum. It's not WWF doing this testing," explains Hummell. "It's the EPA." Some might not see the difference (Sir Paul McCartney wrote them a nasty letter). The testing has been justified because without torturing animals in labs now we won't know if we're going to poison them in the wild later, but it might also have something to do with cash support the WWF receives from animal-testers like Procter & Gamble or Johnson & Johnson.

Despite this, Hummel says he'd "like to think that the animal rights, conservationist and environmental communities have more in common with each other than we do with large corporate interests." Well, yes, that's a very nice thought. But something tells me we won't all be sitting down over soy lattes any time soon.

[Rosemary]

http://www.freeanimals.org/wwf/response.html

Don't fall for WWF lies
Freedom for Animals cares about all animals, Native peoples, and the environment
by Rosemary Amey

A recent article in NOW magazine (The Animal Lib Trap by Mike Smith, April 24-30, 2003) contains substantial misinformation about Freedom for Animals that needs to be corrected.

Smith says that Freedom for Animals thinks that Native people should be left to starve. Obviously, that is not our position. In our brief interview, I said that if we were to get involved in Nunavut animal issues, we would work with the people of Nunavut to find solutions, but that as an animal rights group we would have to rule out any solution that involves killing animals. The whole point of our campaign against WWF is that it is inconsistent, and
immoral, to fundraise in Toronto by telling people their money will be used to save wildlife, and then take that money to Nunavut and say, "We support killing wildlife."

I also pointed out, during the very brief interview, that World Wildlife Fund supports hunting in general, not just hunting done by Inuit people in Nunavut.

Smith also fell for the hunting apologists' line that this is a cultural
conflict of naive urbanites vs. Native and rural communities. If he had asked, which he didn't, he would have learned that I myself am from a rural background, and that Freedom for Animals co-founder Suzanne Lahaie (who was also listed as a contact on the news release) is a woman of part-Native descent from Northern Ontario. Unlike Monte Hummel, however, we don't think
that coming from a rural background makes us superior to people who have been city-dwellers all their lives. Perhaps Hummel's contempt for urban Canadians explains his willingness to mislead them by posing as an animal protection charity, then using donations intended to save wild animals to advocate killing them.

Finally, Smith alleges that animal rights activists do not care about
environmental issues. If he had asked us, which he didn't, he would have learned that Freedom for Animals has been involved in environmental activism, for example, in opposing the so-called "Lands for Life" program. As our mission statement, which appears on our home page, says, "We regard all forms of oppression and exploitation as inter-related: animal abuse, human rights violations, and ecological destruction."

Clearly, one of the most important ways we can help animals is to ensure that they have safe, unpolluted environments to live in. However, unlike groups such as World Wildlife Fund, we believe that wild animals and wild spaces have inherent value, and should not be treated as mere resources to be used and abused by humans.