Crossposted without commentary…
Note: For similar action alerts and commentary, please visit this site’s Katrina archive (which I’ve obviously expanded to include all large-scale disasters, both “natural” and man-made) or my AR blog, easyVegan.info (hint: start with the Natural Disasters category).
———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Kinship Circle - kinshipcircle [at] brick.net
Date: Jun 24, 2007 1:39 AM
Subject: Animals Unseen Collateral Damage
RELIEF GLOBAL / KINSHIP CIRCLE ANIMAL DISASTER RELIEF LIST
KINSHIP CIRCLE COLUMN, 6/24/07
PERMISSION TO CROSS-POST
Columns & Articles: www.kinshipcircle.org/columns_articles/
Animals - War’s Unseen Collateral Damage
By Brenda Shoss, 6/24/07, www.KinshipCircle.org
Kinship Circle’s column runs in The Healthy Planet. Ms. Shoss is also a contributing writer for The Animals Voice, Satya Magazine, VegNews, and other publications. To reprint this column, please request author permission at info [at] kinshipcircle.org
LEFT PHOTO: 8/5/06, network.bestfriends.org/middleeast/news/6547.html
— BETA rescued this little kitten, Louli, from the war zone.
RIGHT PHOTO: 6/4/07, from BETA Team, listmaster [at] betabeirut.com — Car bombs and hand grenades went off in Beirut. The first bomb exploded very close to one of our cat shelters in Ashrafieh area…
War devastates. We grieve for soldiers lost and the involuntary destruction of civilian life. But headlines rarely publicize war’s other collateral damage.
Animals, crimeless and naive, dodge mortars and armored combat vehicles. Their lives explode in a flurry of desertion, starvation, injury and death.
A month into last summer’s Israeli-Hezbollah war, bombs rain over Beirut’s southern suburbs. Israel’s military hopes to defuse Hezbollah’s command post, so Lebanese officials can assert autonomy along the border. Meanwhile, Hezbollah launches rocket strikes inside Haifa and northern Israel.
Helena Hesayne, a Beirut born architect, has little patience for the politics behind battle. Her mission is clear: To rescue animals abandoned in Lebanon’s exodus of one million people. In late July 2006, Hesayne and three others from Beirut For The Ethical Treatment Of Animals (BETA) navigate smoldering rubble in a small convertible. Israeli soldiers eye their car full of dog and cat food.
Hesayne displays BETA’s accreditation papers. She has no fear, only stark resolve to retrieve four cats and one puppy seen locked inside a pet shop. “These animals are banging against the glass door, trying to get out. They are without food and water. I don’t know how long,” Hesayne recounts.
The women persuade another storeowner to unlock the pet shop for them. They are without crates, so they ferry animals toward their car under a downpour of bombs. “The entire time, this tiny puppy just licks our faces. It is the most amazing thing,” Hesayne says.
(more…)
