Written by PETA
Some celebrities make animal-friendly demands when they're on tour, but Madonna isn't one of them.
We already knew the Material Girl was a fur hag. Now, she's added to her animal-unfriendly rep by purchasing 110 pounds of kosher meat for the last two performances of her "Sticky and Sweet" tour in Tel Aviv.
We immediately sent her a letter explaining that most imported kosher beef sold in Israel comes from Uruguay, where cattle are often shackled and violently wrestled to the ground before having their throats cut and being hoisted into the air by their hind legs—a cruel "shackle and hoist" slaughter method that the Chief Rabbinate of Israel has called "primitive" and has promised to phase out.
Instead of ordering her weight in meat, Madge would win over more fans if she gave a compassionate diet a try.
Written by Amanda Schinke
Aerosmith's oldie album, Toys in the Attic, includes a naughty number, "Big Ten Inch Record," which fans suspect wasn't really about a record. For decades, many listeners have wondered if a certain band, er, member was the inspiration for the song.
Well, after a recent interview with the pro-hunting rag-azine, Outside Living, I think we can all agree that the song is not about Aerosmith's Joe Perry.
In the interview, Perry said, "(Hunting) really gives you a great opportunity to keep in touch with reality," to which PETA Senior Vice President Lisa Lange shot right back, "People who take out their aggressions and frustrations on helpless animals are usually compensating for other shortcomings in their life." She added, "We don't know how Joe measures up, but it's interesting that he seems to feel so satisfied when he's handling long phallic-looking weapons."
Now that I know Joe Perry likes to harass and shoot helpless animals for "fun," I'll forever hum out loud another oldie whenever I see his mug. It goes, "Ding-a-ling …"
Written by Karin Bennett
Looks like a lot more fun than this:
Written by Shawna Flavell
Never buy an animal on a whim just because you saw one in a movie. How many times do we have to say this?
It looks like at least once more. Harry Potter fans, or to be more precise, their parents, have broken our cardinal rule of movie fandom. As a result, an animal sanctuary has opened on the Isle of Wight in the U.K. to help cope with the problem of owls who have been dumped by people who purchased them without thinking.
In the books and movies, Harry's snowy owl, Hedwig, is portrayed as low-maintenance, but many fans who purchased snowy owls for their kids are realizing that real owls require a lot of attention—and they're abandoning the birds after the magic wears off.
The moral of this story is twofold. Companion animals shouldn't be acquired on a whim, and birds of prey shouldn't be preyed upon by film fanatics.
Vegan prisoners in the U.K. have just won the right to order cruelty-free hygiene products, including essentials such as shampoo and sunscreen. So, you might say that the incarcerated vegans1 will now be protected in their right to bare arms (ba-dum, ching!).
The Vegan Prisoners Support Group has successfully petitioned for inmates to have access to nuts and dairy alternatives as well. Next up? Vegetarian shoes, of course.
While I don't know the state of lip balm in U.S. prisons, I do know which states have the tastiest vegetarian prison food2—and you can check out our celebrated Top 10 List here.
If you visited PETA's Web site during the month of November, you probably saw turkey slaughter footage. And no, I don't mean Sarah Palin's infamous turkey pardon fail.
But have you ever seen slaughter footage from Turkey? Turns out animals are killed as cruelly there as anywhere else.
This video was taken in a slaughterhouse in Turkey, but pointlessly cruel abuse like this can happen to any animal anywhere—from the 8-day-old calf who was beaten and kicked while on her way to slaughter in the U.K., to the conscious chicken plunged into scalding-hot water in an Indian slaughterhouse, to any of the animals enduring the many horrific abuses we've documented in the U.S. at Pilgrim's Pride, Smithfield Foods, Butterball, and AgriProcessors facilities, among others.
If this video upsets you, please run, don't walk, over to GoVeg.com and order a copy of our free "Vegetarian Starter Kit." For those of you who are already vegetarians, keep this video handy and show it to the next person who asks you why you refuse to eat anybody who had a mother.
Written by Jeff Mackey
Long before I kicked animal flesh out of my diet, I celebrated my birthdays by eating lobster.
As in, let me celebrate my birth by paying a cook to throw a fully conscious, feeling being into a pot of boiling water to scald to death for my dinner. Ugh.
No wonder my heart skips a beat whenever I read about a caring person who liberates a lobster from a filthy lobster tank so that the animal can be returned to the sea. So my heart nearly burst out of my rib cage when I read that a Slovenian tourist and his daughter bought 30 lobsters for 1,300 euros (more than US$1,860) from a Croatian hotel-restaurant called Hotel Niko in order to free them.
Thirty lobsters have been spared excruciatingly painful deaths and have been returned to the ocean.
Tonight, I'll be celebrating their release with some "Mock Lobster."
The Pretenders' world tour landed in Salt Lake City on Sunday—and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Chrissie Hynde was happy to use the occasion to launch her PETA campaign urging McDonald's to require its suppliers to upgrade to less cruel slaughter methods. In addition to using her stage as a platform to advocate a McDonald's boycott and tossing campaign T-shirts to her audience, Chrissie unveiled her brand-new "i'm hatin' it" ad at a Salt Lake City McDonald's today. Check out some of the action below, and then head to KSL-TV to see how it played on the news:
That spectacular artwork you see there is soon to be on billboards across the country—starting with Chrissie's hometown of Akron, Ohio. Lucky Akron! First it gets its own vegan restaurant, now this awesome billboard …
I got my first vegan pancake recipe from Moby when his berry flapjacks were featured way back when in Seventeen magazine.
He could have stopped there, but it seems like Moby keeps coming up with ways to win my animal-loving heart.
In a recent blog entry, Moby goes the extra mile for animals and the planet by calling out "environmentalist" Al Gore over his refusal to ever mention that animal consumption is the leading cause of climate change. Moby says:
i asked al gore about why he didn't mention this in an 'inconvenient truth' (as animal production is responsible for more greenhouse gases than every car, bus, truck … plane, boat on the planet COMBINED). he answered honestly, basically saying that getting people to drive a hybrid car isn't that difficult. getting people to give up animal products is almost impossible. i appreciated his honesty. so i guess i'll be talking about climate change tomorrow, and i guess i'll have to mention the most inconvenient of inconvenient truths, that you can't talk seriously about climate change and global warming without looking at the role of animal production (animal production being responsible for 24% of greenhouse gas emissions and also the #1 cause of deforestation in the rainforest).
Gore should have named his movie Sorta-Inconvenient Truths if he didn't want to cover the environmental destruction that his meaty diet causes.
You're out for a walk with your dog when two men suddenly appear and grab him before you have a chance to react. In an instant, your canine companion is gone. Then—as if that weren't horrifying enough—you later learn that your beloved friend is caged in a medical school laboratory, slated to be cut open and killed in a training exercise.
It's every animal guardian's worst nightmare, and it allegedly happened recently to Carmen Valverde of Lima, Peru, and her dog, Tomas.
After Tomas was stolen, a neighbor of Carmen's who works at the teaching hospital in the University of San Marcos recognized him while looking in the surgery room in which the school routinely dissects dogs.
The neighbor alerted Carmen and, wearing a lab coat, Carmen was able to sneak into the facility at the university and rescue Tomas, who was already sedated and strapped down for dissection.
While the school claims that it only dissects "dogs [who] don't have owners," after Tomas' story was made public, at least one other guardian found her missing dog in the same laboratory.
We're following this case and will keep you posted on any developments.
This problem isn't limited to Peru. Animals suffer in laboratories no matter where they come from, but laboratories that are willing to pay for animals provide an incentive for unscrupulous people to get animals wherever they can—often from our streets and yards. "Bunchers" may drug animals, pose as animal control officers, or answer "free to a good home" ads to get puppies and kittens to sell.
You can help end this nightmare by doing the following:
If you have a general question for PETA and would like a response, please e-mail Info@peta.org. If you need to report cruelty to an animal, please click here. If you are reporting an animal in imminent danger and know where to find the animal and if the abuse is taking place right now, please call your local police department. If the police are unresponsive, please call PETA immediately at 757-622-7382 and press 2.
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