Royal Canin is a large pet food manufacturer. They sponsor lots of cat and dogs shows. They decided that it is a good way to promote their products. They are a French company that is now owned by a large, renown British company, Mars. Mars makes Whiskas cat food, a well known brand in the UK.
Royal Canin have a facility in Ukraine. In Ukraine bear baiting still takes place. In the UK, the Cruelty to Animals Act 1835 banned it! That is 178 years ago. And this is one of the world’s great problems. Different regions and countries have developed at different speeds. This causes an imbalance and huge stresses and problems one of which is mass immigration.
Well, it appears that the branch of Royal Canin in Ukraine extended their fondness for sponsoring cat and dog shows to sponsoring bear baiting. It seems that they sponsored an event where bear baiting took place. Two specially trained dogs attack a chained bear causing massive injuries and some people in Ukraine like to watch it and place bets on it. Henry VIII of England (1491 – 1547) did the same thing.
The bear in the sponsored event survived. Mars are horrified. They appear not to have known about it. Royal Canin based in France state that they have a highly ethical approach to animal research and have apologised. Although initially they produced some sort of mealy-mouthed statement that did not satisfy Mars? I don’t know but the statement was changed later.
Also we are to thank an Austrian charity, Four Paws who are involved in bear welfare who put pressure on Royal Canin and the Daily Express a British newspaper for reporting on it – the source of this article.
Royal Canin have “pledged” to donate £250,000 to “find and save up to 20 bears” (the words of the Express reporter). What chance of it happening?
There is a video on YouTube of the Ukraine bear baiting, which has been removed (black screen) by YouTube as it violated their rules. That is how bad it is.
Note: My thanks to Harvey for telling me about this story.
Royal Canin Ukraine:
04071, Ukraine, Kiev,
Str. Upper Shaft, 24A, of. 31
…and we also talked about cat games on tablets/ipads – if it were video you would see how rough they are trying to attack it – these aren’t my cats:
I don’t believe this picture. I didn’t realise that cats can be as addicted to tablet computers as humans 😉
Must be a very cat friendly game. Great picture. It has given me an idea for an article.
The reaons I bought the tablet was for the cats. I only did it because I saw how crazy they went for my fairly large samsung phone – every evening we’d have a play with the phone session so I eventually just got the tablet and they seem to love it. They don’t get tired of it – there are certain games they like better of course but they each a bit have their own taste for games too.
We talked about cats and skype some time ago – here Lilly sees her old friend on Skype.
Damn. Cats are getting better at computers than some people. I can see how you have used technology to the max. to improve the lives of your cats. Love to see it.
Hi Marc. Lovely kittens. Sadly I no longer have any solid black cats. My last one Kerim disappeared 2 months back without leaving a trace, and a black long haired tom who I called Midnight also vanished before I could even adopt him a several years ago. Black seems to be an unlucky colour – for the cats themselves, not people.
This is Jasmine. Her mother Minos is from the Ankara Zoo who I think is now past it. So I see Jasmine and her half sister Fatima as central to my original Turkish Angora conservation program, at least on paper, because my other cats tested even purer Ankara kedisi than Minos. Here is Sorpresa, one of Jasmine’s daughters.
Beautiful – she really is.
A special cat. Gosh. I have a soft spot for the TA because they are so much part of the history of the domestic cat and they are beautiful.
Hi Michael. Thanks for the info. Here is a test posting of a photo to check that it is working.
It is working and the photo is very nice indeed. Handsome cat. Wow, I would love a cat like that! Everyone would be jealous.
Beautiful photo of a beautiful cat Harvey 🙂 I will try adding one now of the last 2 kittens born this spring to be adopted:
That’s a lovely photo Marc
When I see the photo I sigh. So much beauty and innocence. Great pic.
yes, I love kittens for the same reason and they are so much fun to play with, so curious and full of energy.
But they are so hard to photograph when they are tiny – especially when they are dark coloured and consantly squirming around 🙂
Such a beauty, just look at that tail!
Mars are not a lily white company:
http://marscandykills.com/experiments.asp
So it’s a bit incredible that they were ‘horrified’ to find out about bear baiting!
Thanks for that information, Ruth. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had turned a blind eye to it and as for Royal Canin’s animal testing policy, I am not sure about that either. I am very cynical about the ethics of big business. I bet that if we revisited this particularly problem in a years time nothing will have changed.
I don’t think any of them give a damn about anything except profit – anything they do well is simply done to look good in order not to lose customers. If they raised welfare standards it’s because they think they should to keep well with public opinion so sales and turnover continue going at a high rate.