Today, as Japanese fishers began stabbing dolphins with spears and cutting their throats with knives, PETA members, along with members of Earth Island Institute and Ric O'Barry's Dolphin Project, marked "Dolphin Day" by gathering outside the Japanese Embassy in Washington, D.C., to protest the annual slaughter. 

Protesters screened graphic footage from the Oscar-winning documentary The Cove, showing how fishers in the village of Taiji chase entire schools of dolphins into a cove, trap them, and slaughter them as they scream and struggle to escape. The water turns bright red with the dolphins' blood.

People in many other cities around the world today also protested the slaughter, which will claim the lives of up to 23,000 dolphins and whales over the next six months. The animals are killed because they are considered "pests" by the fishing industry, although a few are captured alive and sold to aquariums and swim-with-dolphins programs, where they will spend the rest of their lives confined to cramped tanks.

You can help stop this by contacting your local Japanese Embassy and demanding that Japan end the cruel slaughter immediately.  

Written by Michelle Sherrow

If there is one person who can command national attention for an issue, it is "queen of all media" Oprah Winfrey. That's why Saving America's Mustangs, a group run by PETA supporter Madeleine Pickens, has enlisted actors, musicians, and athletes to film an appeal to Oprah asking her to help them protect the few wild horses remaining in the West.
 

  
Just 100 years ago, there were 2 million free-roaming horses in and around Nevada. Today, there are fewer than 28,000. But that isn't stopping the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) from continuing to round up wild horses and confine them by the tens of thousands to holding pens, where they may be held for years before being sold. To get the horses into the corrals, workers rope, drag, and kick them and run them down with helicopters, killing some of them in the process. The roundups cost taxpayers $70 million per year. On July 1, the BLM will resume rounding up even more horses during foaling season.

Why is the BLM so hell-bent on rounding up wild horses? Two words: cattle ranchers. When horses compete with cows for grazing land, guess who ends up the loser? It's just one more of the many excellent reasons not to eat beef cows. 

Oprah has done a wonderful job exposing the horrors of puppy mills, the Japanese dolphin slaughter, and factory farm cruelty. Will wild mustangs be the first animals to star on her new network? Stay tuned …

Written by Michelle Sherrow