It was a cruel irony. Birds raised for foie gras become so ill that they can barely walk, much less fly. Yet fly they did on certain American Airlines international flights during which foie gras was served in first class. After PETA was alerted to this by upset passengers, we contacted airline officials and informed them about the cruelty of foie gras production, which involves jamming pipes down ducks' and geese's throats and pumping several pounds of grain and fat into their stomachs every day until their livers expand to up to 10 times their normal size. An average of 20 percent of ducks on foie gras farms die before slaughter, 10 to 20 times the average death rate on a regular duck farm.

We're thrilled to announce that now foie gras is no longer being served on any American Airlines flights!

What You Can Do

Speak up whenever you see foie gras being sold in a store or served in a restaurant. Let restaurant managers know that as long as the livers of force-fed birds are on the menu, nothing can force you to eat there.

Every year, more than 124,000 primates are tormented and killed in U.S. laboratories. Have you ever wondered how these intelligent and sensitive animals wind up in these hellholes in the first place?

Some primates are born in laboratories, forced to exist from cradle to grave as living "tools" exploited by experimenters who perform painful, invasive procedures on the animals, and then they're tossed out like so much trash when the experimenters are done with them.

For tens of thousands of other primates, the journey begins thousands of miles away in Asia and Africa, where—at the behest of global animal testing multinationals like Charles River Laboratories and Covance—they are bred in cramped, squalid breeding mills or are trapped or netted in the wild. Ripped away from their families, the traumatized primates are shoved into cramped wooden crates and shipped in the noisy and terrifying cargo holds of planes, often with unsuspecting passengers just a few feet above them.

One of the worst drivers of the miserable primate trade is animal testing conglomerate Shin Nippon Biomedical Laboratories (SNBL), which brings nearly 3,000 primates into the U.S. each year for use in experimentation. Recent photos and video footage leaked to PETA by a whistleblower at an SNBL laboratory in Everett, Washington, show sick, distraught monkeys imprisoned in barren steel cages. The whistleblower reports that monkeys suffered untreated wounds from being stabbed repeatedly with needles to have blood drawn multiple times a day, and that workers handling the monkeys were so rough that they bloodied the animals' noses and broke their fingers and toes.

Nearly every major airline—including Delta Airlines, Qantas, American Airlines, British Airways, Aer Lingus, Cathay Pacific, and dozens of others—have agreed not to transport primates to laboratories, but some, including Air Canada, Air China, Air France, China Eastern Airlines, China Southern Airlines, Philippine Airlines, and Vietnam Airlines—continue to profit off shipping primates to their deaths.

You can help primates by clicking here and telling these airlines that cruelty doesn't fly with you and that it shouldn't fly with them either.

A family is suing American Airlines after their loved one died on a flight, reportedly after consuming chicken contaminated with bacteria.

Fluke? Not so much. The Food and Drug Administration reports that there are 48 million cases of foodborne illness in the U.S. every year, resulting in 128,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths. Consumer Reports found the leading bacterial causes of foodborne illness—salmonella and campylobacter—in two-thirds of the chickens that it purchased nationwide.

If you don't enjoy your meals served with a side of vomiting, diarrhea, fever, and abdominal cramps, not to mention cruelty, maybe it's time to jettison chicken from your diet. Check out a wide variety of chicken-free recipes at our Living page.

jasejc/cc by 2.0

 
The skies just got friendlier for primates of the nonhuman variety. American Airlines has publicly confirmed that it will no longer transport nonhuman primates to be used in experiments. In adding cruelty to its no-fly list, American Airlines joins British Airways, United Airlines, Virgin Atlantic, Qantas, Delta Air Lines, Air China, Monarch Air Group, Amerijet, IBC Airways, and several other airlines in refusing to transport primates to facilities where they will be tormented and killed in experiments.

You may also recall that Lufthansa airlines agreed last year to stop transporting dogs and cats to laboratories after a PETA action alert generated an enormous response from concerned people.

You can help stop laboratory abuse at its source by asking the federal government to divert funding from cruel experiments on animals to modern non-animal methods and human-based clinical research.
 

Written by Michelle Sherrow

On Monday, we blogged about the risks posed to animals who are stowed away like luggage in the cargo holds of planes. On Tuesday, those warnings became a heartbreaking reality for seven puppies who died after being shipped from Tulsa, Oklahoma, to Chicago in the hold of a commercial airline.

Shipping animals as if they were duffel bags or cosmetics cases is wrong for many reasons, one being that the cargo holds of airplanes are often not temperature-controlled. During the summer months, the temperature in this area of a plane can be deadly. Investigators are considering heatstroke as one possible cause of death for the puppies. It's believed that temperatures in Tulsa were already 86 degrees before 7 a.m., and the puppies were loaded into the cargo hold and left there as the flight was delayed on the tarmac for more than an hour. If this is the case, the puppies may have been baked alive in temperatures well above 100 degrees. A dog can succumb to heatstroke in just 15 minutes, and it's not a pleasant way to go.

We have set up a memorial page for the animals over on our True Friends Memorials site. Please take a minute to leave some kind words and consider donating to help other animals in need. And the next time you travel with your animal companions, only fly if they can fly in the cabin with you—or make it a road trip, and let Fido ride shotgun.

Written by Shawna Flavell