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Animal Wellness Action and Showing Animals Respect and Kindness demand authorities act against staged live animal shoots—this one featuring shooting of up to 15,000 imported, domesticated pigeons for a competition in an orgy of waste and bloodshed in a small Florida town.
Dear friend,
Our new investigation with Showing Animals Respect and Kindness (SHARK) is so appalling and revolting that it makes me want to scream out loud in frustration and anger and indignation.
It was an animal massacre in Okeechobee, Fla. And it happened this past weekend. This week, we are announcing our findings to the world, including at a press conference in south Florida.
Millionaire shooters slaughtered about 15,000 pigeons in a “Swamp Shoot Out”—with pigeons trucked in from 1,000 miles away just to be blown up with lead ammo—at the Quail Creek Hunting Ranch in the small Florida town.
It was a competition shooting event involving live animals, with the gunslingers having no intention of using the animals for food and making no pretense of population control or any wildlife management purpose. It looks like the private shooting club paid $200,000 last year to a Texas broker to bring the pigeons into Florida just for the orgy of killing.
We partnered on this investigation with the courageous team at SHARK, and with them, today, we released footage of the animal massacre and called out the owner of the club—the CEO of Jack Link’s Meat Snacks based in Minong, Wisc., and Minneapolis, Minn.
Today we sent letters with documentation to a State’s Attorney in that region of Florida and also to the Division of Law Enforcement with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission to compel them to act to prevent this kind of barbarism from recurring in the Sunshine State. And we are calling out Troy Link, the owner of the shooting club, the CEO of Jack Links Meat Snacks, and the man pulling the strings on this collective act of cruelty against thousands of animals.
Years ago, I worked with Steve Hindi of SHARK against an infamous pigeon shoot in the small coal country town of Hegins, Pa. Eventually, with an assist from many others who worked for years to battle that massacre, we eventually got it stopped.
Today, we open a new chapter to shut down these clandestine, cruel, and possibly illegal pigeon shoots at this location and others across the nation.
In the video we’re releasing today, pigeons are kept in boxes with a spring-loaded ejection device and when sent a few feet in the air, the shooters take aim at them with shotguns loaded with lead ammunition and blast them apart.
Any self-respecting hunter would vomit at the thought of such a spectacle.
“When target shooters have skeet and clay targets for recreational target shooting, this is malicious and sickening to bring in dehydrated, starved pigeons, put them in boxes, and send them a few feet in the air to shoot them,” said Steve Hindi, president of SHARK.
If this isn’t staged animal cruelty, I don’t know what is.
The shot birds who crash to the ground inside the fenced area of the shoot are retrieved by runners who snap the birds’ necks or twist off their heads. But other wounded birds land outside the shooting fields, go unretrieved, and die more slowly and agonizingly in the thickets and nearby lakes.
Bald eagles, other raptors, and small mammals scavenge on these carcasses and are poisoned by the fragments of lead sprinkled through the bodies of the wounded and dead pigeons. This compounds the cruelty and expands the species diversity of the victims harmed on these killing grounds.
The personnel at Troy Link’s company need to know that this is what his company’s profits enable.
And we ask you to call Jack Links at (715) 466-6608 and tell the company that its CEO should not orchestrate this kind of animal massacre.
We also encourage you to sign this national petition to Troy Links to cease his involvement and leadership in pigeon shooting spectacles. [[link removed]]
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Finally, I hope you’ll support our work, so we can continue to partner with groups like SHARK on our investigations and rewards programs aimed at cockfighting, dogfighting, horse slaughter, and now live pigeon shoots. [[link removed]]
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Fighting for all animals,
Wayne Pacelle [[link removed]] Wayne Pacelle
President
Animal Wellness Action
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