Written by PETA
There's only one rule at Vosges Chocolate's Exotic Candy Bar Library: Once you've checked out your selection, it's totally yours to keep. And with fancy vegan chocolate flavors such as Creole and Black Pearl, we have a feeling that the shelves will be empty in no time.
Want a collection of your own? We're giving away one of these edible libraries to the reader who comes up with the best animal-friendly literary mash-up. (Seriously—if Jane Austen and zombies can successfully join forces, then so can animals and literary classics!) My compassionate mash-up? To Save a Mockingbird!
Start wiggling your inner bookworm, and then enter by posting your re-imagined title in the comments section. The contest ends on March 24, 2010, and we'll pick the winner on March 26, 2010. Be sure to read our privacy policy and terms and conditions, as you're agreeing to both by commenting. Good luck!
Written by Logan Scherer
Spring cleaning is about to take on a whole new meaning in Colorado Springs, where officials facing a lack of funds have removed trash cans from public parks. To help the mayor stop the economic slump from turning Colorado Springs' parks into dumps, PETA is offering to bring back the wastebaskets, with one caveat—they need to sport this ad:
How does meat trash the planet? A U.N. study found that factory farming is "one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global." Our name for these doubly productive garbage cans? Wasteless Baskets.
The cost of keeping wild animals in captivity is always more than the price of admission to a zoo or amusement park. Just ask the woman who lost two of her fingers after trying to feed a caged black bear at a Wisconsin zoo last week. The 47-year-old woman—who was with her 3-year-old granddaughter and boyfriend—had her thumb and forefinger bitten off, and two other fingers were partially severed. The boyfriend was also bitten while trying to pry open the bear's jaw to get the animal to release the woman's hand, but he didn't lose any fingers.
Bears in captivity spend much of their time pacing, walking in tight circles, swaying or rolling their heads, and showing other signs of psychological distress. These behaviors are not just symptoms of boredom—they indicate profound depression caused by being denied everything that is natural and important to them. Bears, like any wild animal, are unpredictable and will try to defend themselves if they feel threatened and are unable to escape—sometimes with serious or deadly consequences.
News of this perilous encounter comes less than two weeks after Tilikum—the imprisoned orca—killed a SeaWorld trainer. It's just further evidence that patrons of zoos or any facilities that display captive animals are not only supporting the mental, physical, and emotional torment of animals, they are risking their own safety as well.
Q: If "Happiness Is a Dead Animal," then what does that make a malnourished, exhausted, or mistreated animal?
A: A hot dog, according to the meat industry, which recently admitted that it uses dark, firm, and dry (DFD) meat—which "can be the result of prolonged stress in animals prior to slaughter, either because the animals have been underfed, or they are overly fatigued due to transportation and mishandling, or both"—to make "high-quality" products like hot dogs.
Makes perfect sense, right? If an animal is destined for slaughter, why bother treating him or her humanely when you can use his or her underfed and overly fatigued flesh to make hot dogs? I'm thinking that all the antibiotics, dioxins, and hormones that are loaded into meat have finally gotten to those industry officials' heads.
Instead of chowing down on DFD flesh, maybe they should try some DDF (that's "darn delicious faux") meat instead?
Picture it: a dark sushi restaurant on a Los Angeles street, secret agents sitting inside, and a lone car waiting outside. Real-life undercover investigation or Hollywood moviemaking gold? Well, considering that the brave brains behind this very real, very covert operation are also the Oscar-winning filmmaking team behind The Cove, the answer is both!
Back in October, Charles Hambleton—The Cove's associate producer—got word that the Hump, a trendy L.A. sushi restaurant, was serving whale meat, which is illegal in the U.S. Hambleton's informants sent samples of the sushi to Scott Baker, associate director of the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University, who confirmed that the sample was meat from an endangered Sei whale.
While the consumption of whale meat is practically unheard of in the U.S., it's sold in marketplaces across Japan and is even served in school lunches. All the whale meat consumed by the Japanese comes from the hundreds of whales the Japanese claim to be slaughtering for scientific purposes.
Fast-forward to the week before the Oscars, when Louie Psihoyos—director of The Cove—and the other crewmembers from the film went undercover at the Hump, where they confirmed that the restaurant is still serving whale.
Psihoyos and his team made another visit to the Hump, this time accompanied by federal agents, and were, once again, served whale meat, giving the government officials the evidence they needed to get a warrant to search the restaurant's premises on Friday.
There's been no word yet on what the feds found, but according to the Marine Mammal Protection Act, those charged with possession or sale of marine mammals may face up to a year in prison or a $20,000 fine. In the meantime, is anyone else hoping that all this means that the intrepid moviemaking, sushi-spying heroes will team up for another film to save animals?
One whistleblower's powerful testimony about the abuse of pigs and calves in slaughterhouses throughout the country may bring about a serious overhaul in the U.S. government's monitoring of slaughterhouses.
Dean Wyatt is a veterinarian and supervisor of the Food Safety and Inspection Services (FSIS), which is a part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Last week, Wyatt told the members of a House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee that time after time, his warnings about unsafe slaughterhouse practices went ignored. Two of the slaughterhouses he worked with—one in Oklahoma that allegedly mishandled pigs and one in Vermont that he ordered to shut down three times for mistreating calves—ignored his directives to stop abusing animals. And a Government Accountability Office report released Thursday supports Wyatt's claims, admitting that the FSIS has a history of unsuccessfully regulating slaughterhouses and that it is lax in its enforcement of humane slaughtering standards:
Now governmental officials are saying that they will take steps to improve the agency's enforcement standards. So does this mean that we'll see more stringent enforcement anytime soon? We hope so. But in the meantime, there's no reason to support the massacre of animals or to jeopardize your health: Go vegan!
Despite record low ice levels, Canadian officials seem hell bent on choking down baby seal flesh before they'll willingly choke back their pride and denounce the seal slaughter. According to news reports, tomorrow, in an effort to thumb their noses at the E.U.'s recent seal-product ban, Canada's parliamentary restaurant will be serving seal meat to politicians (and in other news, I just threw up a little).
This isn't the first time that government officials have proposed placing the decomposing flesh of a bludgeoned baby seal on their menu, and according to Senator Celine Hervieux-Payette, the bloody feast is meant to demonstrate "the solidarity of the Canadian Parliament behind those who earn a living from the seal hunt."
(Not so) sorry to break it to Senator Hervieux-Payette, but the commercial seal slaughter, which accounts for 97 percent of seals killed each year, is not a subsistence trade. Profit from the slaughter barely exceeded C$1 million in 2009, and the average pay for a sealer was just C$200.
So, after you RSVP to our International Day of Action for seals, join the more than half a million people who have urged Canada to cancel the massacre.
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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