Two of SHARK's Victories in 2016
An Animal Rights Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM

SHowing Animals Respect and Kindness (SHARK)
November 2016

[Please see SHARK/SHowing Animals Respect and Kindness 2016 Year in Review (PDF) for more!]

SHARK shuts down cruel New Jersey rode

This past June, SHARK shut down a cruel Mexican-style rodeo that was scheduled to be at the Dream Park in Gloucester County, NJ!

Last year a SHARK investigator went undercover at a similar rodeo held at that venue. The video he took, which included bulls being mercilessly whipped and shocked with an electric prod, as well as rampant alcohol abuse, received major media coverage and the venue banned the rodeo.

This new rodeo lied to the owners, saying that it was only going to be a “dance.” We discovered the truth, moved quickly and forcefully and the event was immediately cancelled. The bad guys almost got their way, but SHARK's vigilance stopped them in their tracks!

Horrendous Ray Killing Contest Shut Down in Maryland and Virginia

Last year, Maryland-based Fish Feel alerted us to a horrendous cownose ray killing contest on the Patuxent River where pregnant rays were shot by bowhunters for fun and prize money. There were three contests held that year, two in Maryland and one in Virginia.

SHARK’s video of the slaughter was so dramatic that one of the contests lost its sponsors and it and the VA contest were cancelled! The third contest was put on by a group called American Bowhunters. We got the group kicked out of the first location they scheduled for the weigh-in station because they were not honest with the owner. We then got them kicked out of the second location because they misled that owner as well. They hid the third location hoping we would not find out where they would be, but we found it anyway. As the killers learned, we are relentless in our mission to fight animal cruelty!

Thanks to a previous donation by animal protection heroes Bob Barker and Nancy Burnet, we had our boat, the Bob & Nancy, on the river that day. This enabled us to fly our remote-controlled drone over the bowhunters. The video we captured was horrifying; not only were rays tortured and left to die slow deaths in buckets filled with their own blood, but one loathsome bowhunter was filmed shooting a baby ray at point blank range with an arrow. This tiny animal (below) then struggled and suffered terribly as she bled out on the bowhunters boat.

The video of this cruelty became international news with one British newspaper headline reading, “Sick killers shoot and torture mother and baby rays,” and another saying, “It's just an excuse for a blood fest.”

Working with our partners at Fish Feel we took the video of the slaughter and held a press conference in Maryland. News coverage in the state was massive and has led to legislation being crafted to end these barbaric killing contests!

Only SHARK thought to put a boat in the river and fly a drone to film the contest. Without that creative thinking and hard-fought activism, the bowhunters would have slaughtered to their hearts’ content without anyone knowing the horrors they were committing. This is another example of the technological advances SHARK uses for the protection of animals.

We want to thank our good friend Chris DeRose of Last Chance for Animals who joined us on our boat for the ray killing contest.

HELP SHARK!

All the victories and ground-breaking campaigns we have shown you in this email, and that we will show you in forthcoming ones, would be impossible if not for your generous support. The truth is, we need that support right now. Our funds are almost gone. There is only enough money to pay for our investigators for a few months, then it’s over.

SHARK has only four full-time investigators who work day and night fighting for animals, and I mean that literally. You will find no more dedicated servants for the animals anywhere and the amount of work we do with so few people humbles me. I’m willing to bet that if you add all of their salaries (I am and have always been unpaid) it will come in under what one top executive of one of the big corporate animal groups rakes in every year. No where else will you find better value for your donation than with SHARK.

I believe in SHARK and our mission. That’s why I implore you to reach out to every one you know, show them what we do, and ask them to help us continue our vital work. I truly appreciate all that you have done for SHARK in the past, and I sincerely hope you will support us so that 2017 may bring even greater victories for the animals we all care about so much.

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