Animal rights activists celebrated a major victory six months ago. In September 2021, California banned the business of using rescued dogs as blood donors. Poor greyhounds rescued from the dog racing industry had to spend one year confined to small cages donating blood every couple of weeks before they would be retired to a permanent home and enjoy a new family. One year of dog life is equivalent to 15 human years. The largest blood-slave dog enterprise, Garden Grove’s Hemopet, had revenue of $3.9 million from the sale of blood products in 2019, Hemopet and its main competitor, Animal Blood Resources International, provide the majority of animal blood products circulated in the United States. The bill would void their licenses 18 months after data shows that volunteer collections produce as much animal blood as these blood-slave dog colonies, reported The Orange County Register. But finding volunteers among dog owners is a challenge.
Since the Russians invaded Ukraine, they’ve been constantly soliciting human volunteers in Belarus who’d donate blood for their military hospitals there. Apparently, it was not working out for them either.
But then the lower chamber of the Russian parliament, the State Duma, proposed a solution, a cruel one. They introduced a forced donation by the Ukrainian Prisoners of War. State Duma deputy Sergey Leonov copied this practice from the Nazi camps (see the video below).
Blood donation has been a difficult topic in modern societies. In the US, blood plasma companies have been buying blood from poorer people, and it was scorned on by The Atlantic. Many societies felt the dearth of volunteers, especially during the Covid lockdown. There were wars, terrorist attacks, accidents, etc. And yet, no one thought of blood slavery. Except now, in 2022, in Russia where Putin declared a war on the Nazis and invaded a county with a democratically elected Jewish president.
The Geneva Convention prohibits blood slavery for POWs, just like it does other things, giving POWs laxatives and organizing humiliation parades, summary executions, rapes and reeducation of civilians, and many more. And yet, in fewer than 100 days of the war, Ukraine saw and documented the cases of all of it.
Ukraine faces an existential threat. And it mobilized all it can to survive, to win, and to prosper. And to continue to live on the 21 century.
