Written by PETA
Finally—a measure of justice for Tina and Jewel. The U.S. District Court in Beaumont, Texas, has slapped Cole Bros. Circus with a $150,000 fine and four years of probation for illegally selling the two elephants to former employee Wilbur Davenport in violation of the Endangered Species Act.
The court also handed Cole Bros. owner John Pugh 300 hours of community service, three years of probation, a $4,000 fine, and a mandatory $1,200 payment to an organization working toward conservation and rehabilitation of Asian elephants. Davenport was sentenced to 300 hours of community service, three years of probation, and a $5,200 fine.
You may recall that these two elephants were forced to travel and perform, despite being hundreds of pounds underweight. In 2006, PETA filed a complaint with the U.S Department of Agriculture (USDA) after a staffer visited a performance to confirm a whistleblower report that Jewel was emaciated and ailing. The USDA took the almost-unprecedented action of ordering both Tina and Jewel removed from the road, but the elephants were soon back on the road performing stupid tricks after they had "recovered."
After Pugh sold Tina and Jewel to Davenport, who owned Maximus Tons of Fun LLC, PETA again urged the USDA to confiscate Tina and Jewel as well as another elephant used by Davenport named Queenie (also called Boo). We sent letters to officials wherever Davenport was scheduled to appear asking humane authorities to prevent the elephants from performing. The USDA confiscated Jewel and also removed Tina, whom Davenport surrendered to the U.S. Department of the Interior, although Queenie was left behind. Tina and Jewel were eventually transferred to the San Diego Zoo, then moved to the Los Angeles Zoo, and Queenie wound up at the San Antonio Zoo after Davenport relinquished his exhibitor's license.
While life in a zoo isn't ideal for Tina, Jewel, or Queenie, it is better than traveling in a circus and being forced to perform.
PETA will continue to campaign against the Cole Bros. Circus and all exhibitors who treat animals like equipment.
Written by Michelle Sherrow
We all have them—those people in our lives who refuse to believe that you can be healthy without eating meat. Well, now you can point them to the new USDA Dietary Guidelines, in which they'll read the following:
"In prospective studies of adults, compared to non-vegetarian eating patterns, vegetarian-style eating patterns have been associated with improved health outcomes—lower levels of obesity, a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease, and lower total mortality. Several clinical trials have documented that vegetarian eating patterns lower blood pressure. "On average, vegetarians consume a lower proportion of calories from fat (particularly saturated fatty acids); fewer overall calories; and more fiber, potassium, and vitamin C than do non-vegetarians. Vegetarians generally have a lower body mass index. These characteristics and other lifestyle factors associated with a vegetarian diet may contribute to the positive health outcomes that have been identified among vegetarians."
"In prospective studies of adults, compared to non-vegetarian eating patterns, vegetarian-style eating patterns have been associated with improved health outcomes—lower levels of obesity, a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease, and lower total mortality. Several clinical trials have documented that vegetarian eating patterns lower blood pressure.
"On average, vegetarians consume a lower proportion of calories from fat (particularly saturated fatty acids); fewer overall calories; and more fiber, potassium, and vitamin C than do non-vegetarians. Vegetarians generally have a lower body mass index. These characteristics and other lifestyle factors associated with a vegetarian diet may contribute to the positive health outcomes that have been identified among vegetarians."
Now, some folks have been saying this, like, forever, but it's still nice to see the USDA catching up to the mainstream (though it still needs to stop pushing cow's milk, which is anything but a health food). The agency has even included "Vegetarian Adaptations of the USDA Food Patterns" in the guidelines, but if your friends or family members finally get the picture, we can help them get started with a healthy and humane vegetarian diet here.
Written by Jeff Mackey
What some insects are capable of is enough to make the horror film The Fly seem cuddly by comparison. In a study funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, researchers collected flies and cockroaches from manure on pig farms and found that the insects carried the same antibiotic-resistant bacteria as the pigs who were fed the drugs. The bacteria samples were resistant to erythromycin, streptomycin, and kanamycin and were highly resistant to tetracycline.
According to researcher Dr. Ludek Zurek, the insects can travel from farms to nearby residences and spread the antibiotic-resistant bacteria to people through contact with food. If the bacterial strains multiply in large numbers, they have the potential to leave patients immune to the healing effects of antibiotic medications, which could make treatment for infections difficult. The new research mirrors what previous studies have shown about the danger that antibiotic-resistant bacteria pose to people. To quote The Fly, "Be afraid. Be very afraid."
Update: Based on PETA complaints documenting abuse and neglect of animals in the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston's laboratories, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has taken the rare step of fining the facility $9,143 for egregious violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act—including failing to supply veterinary care to a sheep who had been used in experimental back surgery and could not stand up, failing to supply adequate veterinary care to a goat who died on an operating table, and failing to supply post-procedural pain relief to three sheep used in experimental surgeries.
Update: After reviewing our evidence, the U.S. Department of Agriculture inspected UTMB’s laboratories and confirmed our findings of multiple Animal Welfare Act violations.
A whistleblower at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston (UTMB) has contacted PETA to report horrifying—and potentially illegal—abuses of dogs, sheep, monkeys, mice, and other animals who were tormented for experiments in the school's laboratories.
The insider reported that as a result of experiments in which dogs were cut open and had tubes surgically implanted in their colons, one dog died during surgery and another suffered in pain and died when staff members didn't provide post-operative painkillers. UTMB experimenters also induced spinal cord and nerve damage in sheep, and in one instance, a sheep apparently couldn't stand for three days following surgery and was given no pain relief. Mice apparently died from dehydration, and a monkey was locked in a room all by himself, even though monkeys require social contact with other members of their species to maintain sanity and physical health.
In other procedures conducted in this hellhole, experimenter Daniel Traber subjected sheep, pigs, and mice to third-degree burns on up to 40 percent of their bodies by searing off their skin with a Bunsen burner or a scorching-hot metal rod and forced the animals to inhale smoke.
PETA has filed a formal complaint with the U.S. Department of Agriculture calling for an immediate investigation into these disturbing allegations. You can help by sending an e-mail to UTMB President David L. Callender urging him to investigate these allegations and, if abuses are confirmed, to discipline those responsible.
Conditions for animals who were tormented in experiments at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW-Madison)—where sheep were abused and killed in cruel and illegal decompression experiments, among other horrors—are apparently so bad that they have prompted one of the university's own veterinarians, Richard "Jim" Brown, to call it quits over animal welfare concerns.
Some of the issues Brown complained about included that pigs were transported in an open pickup truck during the bitter cold of winter, rats and mice died after being deprived of food and water, and insects were flying around in a room in which a primate was undergoing surgery, creating unsanitary conditions. Brown's complaints were apparently met with contempt, and he says that he faced reprisals for speaking up for animals.
These allegations aren't surprising, considering UW-Madison's sordid history of Animal Welfare Act violations and its refusal to release information related to the university's invasive and deadly taxpayer-funded eye-movement experiments on monkeys and cats. In fact, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is currently investigating UW-Madison for its ongoing failure to comply with federal animal welfare laws.
Will the loss of one of its own prompt UW-Madison to clean up its act? We'll keep you posted, but in the meantime, let's continue to speak up for the countless animals who are suffering in laboratories at UW-Madison and on college campuses across the country.
Written by Lindsay Pollard-Post
This is pitiful: The USDA recently cited two bear exhibits (Cherokee, North Carolina's Chief Saunooke Bear Park and Cherokee Bear Zoo) for gross violations of the Animal Welfare Act—again.
According to newly released USDA inspection reports, Chief Saunooke Bear Park was cited for failing to provide veterinary care to bears suffering from diarrhea and for feeding bears moldy, wilted food. The Cherokee Bear Zoo was cited for failing to provide veterinary care to a grizzly bear whose hair had been falling out for weeks.
Both facilities were also cited for hazardous cage conditions, such as exposure to electrical outlets and sharp, protruding metal that could cause injury. Uh, yeah, and what about keeping miserable animals with sharp teeth in captivity and letting kids get close to them?! In July, a 9-year-old girl was bitten by a bear at Chief Saunooke Bear Park.
After the incident, PETA erected a billboard featuring a little girl with a bloody bandage around her hand and the words "Warning: Children Bitten at Bear Pits. Bear Prisons: Dangerous for Children."
We've long complained that these unaccredited zoos prisons are unsuitable because they deny bears proper exercise, social interaction, and the ability to hibernate. Please help us close Cherokee's cruel bear pits by sending a personalized message to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians' tourism agency.
Written by Heather Moore
Talk about a cheesy marketing ploy. Sunday's New York Times reveals that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which has long had the paradoxical job of both policing and promoting animal agriculture, runs a multi-million-dollar dairy marketing company with the blandly sinister name Dairy Management Inc.
With an annual budget of nearly $140 million, Dairy Management's stock in trade is the same ingredient that other (less generously funded) arms of the USDA are warning people against: high-fat cheese.
One Dairy Management "success" story is Domino's Pizza. Dairy Management helped the chain develop a new line of pizzas with 40 percent more cheese. The $12 million campaign to promote the new pizza has been a big success (just try to watch an hour or two of prime-time TV without seeing one of the ads)—for Domino's bottom line, that is, not for customers' arteries. Just one slice of the new pizza contains up to two-thirds of the maximum recommended daily limit of saturated fat.
Dairy Management was also the driving force behind those once-ubiquitous dairy ads that claimed that eating more dairy products can help you lose weight. When the sketchy science behind this claim began to unravel (research that was partly funded by Dairy Management), the industry was forced to scrap the ads.
Thanks in part to Dairy Management's marketing campaigns, Americans now eat an average of 33 pounds of cheese per year—nearly triple the 1970 rate. Cheese has become the largest source of saturated fat in Americans' diets.
It gives a new meaning to the term "bloated bureaucracy," doesn't it? Speaking of which: When fiscal conservatives start looking for a place to cut government spending, may we suggest, ahem, cutting the cheese?
Written by Alisa Mullins
PETA filed a formal complaint today with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) calling for an immediate investigation into painful, deadly, and, we believe, illegal veterinary vaccine potency tests on hamsters at Colorado Serum Company (CSC) in Denver.
The persistent folks in PETA's Regulatory Testing Division have repeatedly written and called CSC to make sure its officials are aware that in 2006 the USDA approved a non-animal test in place of an obsolete and lethal method of using hamsters to test the Leptospira vaccine. The Animal Welfare Act states that the use of animals should only be approved when alternatives are not available, but CSC is killing hundreds of hamsters a year, without providing them with any pain relief—more than 1,850 of them in just the past four years.
And catch this: According to CSC's annual reports, the company "found no new information which would allow for a change in our approach to these issues," even though a simple Web search would have clued someone in. In fact, CSC has done nothing but copy the same information that it used in 2004 to justify its use of animals into every report through 2009!
We'll keep on top of this case. If you're sick of pointless cruelty to animals or want to know more about superior test methods, check this out.
And, this week's 10% Wool "Tag and Release" winner is ... Beth Ann! Congratulations.
Don't forget to check out the archive of past 10% Wool comic strips here. Get more information on the series and the writer here, and learn how to get Jeff's other comic, DeFlocked, into your local paper here.
This just in: In response to PETA's undercover investigation of animal experiments at the University of Utah (the U) and the complaint that we filed with U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the U has been cited for nine violations of federal animal protection laws, including 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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