For 34 years, Sally and her guardian were together nearly every day. The loving man doted on his horse, keeping her well cared for and giving her the run of his property.

But Sally's age was catching up with her. Her once-sparkling brown eyes had completely lost their sight, she was losing weight, and her movements were becoming more and more laborious. Even though Sally could no longer see the man she loved, she could still hear his voice, and she came to him whenever he called. It was a daily struggle for the man to watch Sally deteriorate. He feared that she would get worse before her aging body finally quit, but he was also scared to call her veterinarian and end her suffering. 

When PETA received a concerned call about the horse from someone who had gone past the property, we called to speak to Sally's guardian. The gentleman was practically in tears over his beloved horse. He knew that the coming winter would make life even harder for Sally, but he agonized every day over the decision to end her suffering.

PETA's caseworker knew that the man needed help letting Sally go. She explained what he already knew—that Sally was no longer comfortable in her body, that her quality of life was significantly diminished, and that he was going to have to be strong for her now.

It seemed to be what the man needed to hear. He gathered his strength, called his veterinarian, and lovingly said goodbye to his precious Sally. PETA called to check on him, reassure him, and comfort him during his loss.

Saying goodbye to our animal family members is heartbreaking, for sure. But when the end comes, we have to love them enough to endure the pain so that they don't have to. 

A newspaper exposé has led to an investigation by Ontario's Environment Ministry into four mass animal graves at the province's Marineland theme park. According to a former park employee, the graves contain the bodies of more than 1,000 animals, including orcas, dolphins, seals, walruses, bears, bison, and deer.

Former marine-mammal trainer Phil Demers described one particularly gruesome incident to a reporter from the Toronto Star. After an orca named Kandu died in December 2005, he was buried on the park's grounds. But staffers failed to obtain brain tissue samples during the whale's necropsy, so Demers and another trainer were assigned the macabre task of exhuming Kandu's body two weeks later.

"He was not frozen and it smelled so bad and there was blood all over the place," says Demers. "I was elbow deep in the pit in a reddish orangey sludge and we both kept coming up to vomit. It was gross."

Graveyard of Niagara Falls

The graves may be illegal, since Ontario requires waste permits to dispose of animal corpses and the park apparently had no such permits. Government officials are also concerned about possible contamination of the water and soil, especially because of the graves' close proximity to the Welland River, which feeds nearby Niagara Falls.

PETA has been campaigning against Marineland for years, citing the park's abysmal conditions and the high mortality rate among young whales and dolphins. The park also has a long history of obtaining wild-caught beluga whales, dolphins, and orcas, including Keiko, aka "Willy" from the movie Free Willy, whom Marineland sold to an even more depressing park in Mexico, where he languished for years before being rescued and rehabilitated. This summer, Demers and seven other former trainers came forward to report numerous instances of neglect and abuse, including serious damage to animals' skin and eyes because of filthy, tainted water.

Alarmingly, Ontario is Canada's only province that does not regulate the keeping and displaying of exotic animals or conduct public-safety inspections. Parks like Marineland are allowed to "police" themselves, and Marineland's mass graves are silent testimony to how good—or bad—of a job it's doing.

You Can Help

Refuse to patronize any marine park, including SeaWorld, which also has a tragic track record. Please voice your objections about the lack of adequate captive-animal protection laws in Ontario to Premier Dalton McGuinty:

The Honourable Dalton McGuinty

Premier of Ontario
Rm. 281, Main Legislative Bldg., Queen's Park
Toronto, Ontario M7A 1A4
416-325-7578 (fax)

In an oddball attempt to break back into the Japanese fast-food market, Wendy's had introduced a burger that contained foie gras—you know, the smashed, bloated liver of a force-fed goose. But after a PETA campaign—including action alerts (hooray to everyone who chipped in) and an appeal to fellow Wendy's shareholders—the burger chain has dropped the foie gras.

California has banned the sale and production of foie gras, and its production has also been outlawed in more than a dozen countries, including Australia, Germany, Israel, and the U.K. Most airlines won't serve it, and the best of the big grocery stores won't stock it.

What You Can Do

If you learn that a restaurant you patronize serves foie gras, please tell the store's owners or managers where foie gras comes from: the utter misery of force-fed birds. Ask them to watch the shocking undercover video recently released by PETA U.K. and narrated by Sir Roger Moore, and let them know that you won't be dining there again until foie gras is taken off the menu.

UPDATE: Santa Paws brought a gift early this year! We're delighted to share some great news to kick off the holidays—and what could be better than a happy ending for puppies?

Following the dynamic campaigns of PETA and its affiliates worldwide, the 70 4-month-old beagles sent for horrible experiments in an Indian laboratory have just been rescued! A huge "thank-you" to the more than 50,000 compassionate people around the world who e-mailed Indian officials through the websites of PETA and its international affiliates urging them to take action. The dogs have been removed from quarantine and handed over to animal protection groups with the permission of the Ministry of Environment & Forests and through efforts made internally in government by MP Maneka Gandhi. 

During its campaign, PETA India discovered that Beijing Marshall Biotechnology Co., Ltd. (a branch of the notorious animal-breeding facility Marshall BioResources), had sent a letter to the airline used for the animals' transport—which has a longstanding policy against shipping animals to laboratories—giving false assurances that the beagles "won't be hurt or killed as Lab Animal [sic]."

While these 70 lucky dogs have been spared lives of misery and pain in a laboratory, there's still work to be done to keep more animals out of the hands of experimenters in India. Air India recently resumed shipping animals to laboratories; please urge airline officials to stop delivering animals to their torturers and executioners.

 

Originally posted November 13:

Thanks to a whistleblower, PETA India found out that 70 beagles exported from China into India and falsely labeled as "pets" are actually to be used in deadly experiments.  PETA India is calling on the Indian government to conduct an urgent investigation. It has also asked officials to confiscate the dogs and allow the organization to give them a chance at living in peace in adoptive homes instead of facing caging, poisoning, and death in a laboratory.

 As I write, the beagles are being held at Animal Quarantine and Certification Services in Chennai. Their falsified  import paperwork should render the shipment illegal, as PETA India has learned that the animals, sent from commercial breeder Beijing Marshall Biotechnology Co. Ltd., are actually meant for a laboratory at Advinus Therapeutics.

Saving 70 Snoopys

People may generally picture mice, rats, and rabbits when they think about animals used in experiments, but a great many dogs—including puppies and homeless animals from shelters—are tormented and killed in laboratories as well. Dogs are often used in toxicology tests in which they are force-fed massive amounts of a drug, industrial chemical, pesticide, or household product, causing a slow, excruciating death from poisoning.

Oddly, experimenters particularly favor beagles because of their size and their eager-to-please nature—a quality that would normally make a person want to protect and care for them, not torture them.

Making the Connection

Even though I have lived with beagles and beagle mixes since childhood—including my current companions, Beau and Oliver—when it came to understanding the inexcusable cruelty of experimenting on animals, I never quite "got it" until I saw this picture during a PETA conference. That's when I realized that there could be never be sufficient justification for inflicting this kind of suffering on a dog so much like Beau.

Then I realized something else: No animal deserves to be burned, poisoned, mutilated, or killed in a laboratory. They're all living beings with thoughts, feelings, and desires—including the desire to live free from harm—just like my dog. Just like me. Even if animal experimentation produced reliable results (which it doesn't), it's no more ethical to torture a mouse, a rabbit, or a monkey in a laboratory in the name of science than it would be to torture us or our animal companions.

 What You Can Do

PETA and its international affiliates are 100 percent committed to ending the torture of animals in cruel tests and experiments, and they've already won many victories. But there's more to be done—and they need your help. Learn how you can help keep animals out of laboratories.

With the Budget Control Act of 2011's 7.8 percent cuts to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on track to kick in at the start of 2013, PETA is urging Congress to take a more drastic measure—cut all funding for wasteful experiments on animals. 

In a letter sent today to congressional leaders, PETA explains that nearly half of NIH's current $30 billion annual research budget is awarded to projects that involve cruel experiments on animals, which do nothing to advance human health and which contribute to the country's expanding deficit. These projects include cruel and costly experiments like these:

• The University of California–San Francisco receives more than $360,000 a year in federal largesse for erectile dysfunction experiments in which rats have their penises cut apart before being killed.
• Columbia University gets half a million dollars a year to addict female monkeys to crack and cocaine in order to see how their drug use is affected by their menstrual cycle.
• The University of Wisconsin–Madison receives more than $330,000 a year for a project in which chicken eggs are injected with pure alcohol to see how the exposure affects baby chicks.
• Oregon Health & Science University—which already bears responsibility for the infamous (and lethal) "gay sheep" experiments—collects more than $2 million a year for a project that includes examining whether the offspring of obese female monkeys are more frightened of Mr. Potato Head dolls than are children of non-obese mothers.

That last one is no joke …

… but it has a sick punch line: Because animal species differ from one another biologically in many significant ways, experiments on animals almost never produce results that can be applied to humans in a meaningful way.

What You Can Do

Please tell your representatives in Washington to stop wasting lives, money, and opportunities on cruel and ineffective experiments on animals.

A little-known restaurant in Hermosa Beach, California, must have thought it was being sly. The restaurant was selling a hamburger topped with foie gras when California's ban on the sale of the cruelly produced, diseased duck liver went into effect on July 1. After the ban was in place, the restaurant continued to serve the foie gras burger but tried to be crafty by changing the menu to read that people who purchased the burger would receive a free side of foie gras. But PETA wasn't buying it.

We contacted the Hermosa Beach Police Department, but with a lot on their plates, they haven't gotten around to the case. So we've taken the matter to court, filing suit against the restaurant, called Hot's Kitchen, for engaging in unlawful business practices.

Of course, selling foie gras isn't just unlawful—it's despicable. Every PETA undercover investigation of a foie gras farm has revealed that ducks often choke to death when workers ram hard metal tubes down their throats to force-feed them and that ducks' organs often rupture from the excessive amounts of grain that are pumped into their stomachs. One duck had a gaping hole in his neck that was so severe that water spilled from it when he drank. And two ducks whose organs had swelled so large that they could not move were being eaten alive by rats.

Foie gras production is so cruel that 15 countries have banned it, including the U.K., Germany, and Australia, and more U.S. states will likely follow California's lead. And PETA intends to make sure that greedy restaurant owners won't get away with underhandedly hawking this "delicacy of despair." 

The Father of the Year Awards aren't until May, but Rep. Paul Ryan needn't hold his breath: PETA has just named Ryan our Bad Dad of 2012, and we're sending him a certificate of dishonor:

Ryan is catching heat for having his 10-year-old daughter pack heat and gun down a deer who was posing a huge threat to the duo by grazing in the woods, unarmed. Instead of spending the Thanksgiving holiday encouraging his child to appreciate nature and be kind to animals who haven't a chance against fancy, high-powered weapons, Ryan was teaching her that killing is terrific stuff. If Ryan's goal was to bond with his daughter, perhaps he should have considered that all animals love their offspring—including deer, whose fawns are sometimes orphaned and left to starve when hunters shoot their parents. 

The Congress member's lesson in violence saw him beating out a mother who tied up her baby outside an off-track betting venue, a father who put a child on a motorcycle with a plastic bag over the toddler's head instead of a helmet, and a guy who had his baby tattooed.

We have suggested plenty of helpful or at least harmless activities that Ryan and his children could engage in, such as canoeing, hiking, biking, bird watching, or even clearing the forest of hunters' beer cans and other trash. 

The day after Thanksgiving is Black Friday, when the holiday gift-shopping season really gets underway. But for animal rights advocates nationwide, it's Fur-Free Friday, also an occasion to hit the stores—to urge consumers not to buy into the cruelty of the skins trade.

Yes, "skins." Even on Fur-Free Friday, it's important to remember that fur isn't the only material used for clothing that results from the suffering of animals. Like fur, leather, for instance, comes from animals who are raised on crowded farms and killed using cruel methods—some are even skinned while they're still alive. Whether it comes from a snake or a sable, a cow or a chinchilla, it's all skin—and we, not they, can live without it.

PETA hopes that everyone heading out to (or returning from) a Fur-Free Friday demonstration will be able to answer the question, "Whose skin am I in?" with the reply, "Only my own!"

With the approach of holiday travel, drivers nationwide are anticipating pain at the pump—but it will sting a bit more for some motorists in Madison, Wisconsin, where  gas stations in high-traffic areas are now displaying PETA ads with a shocking photo taken inside a University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW) laboratory in which dozens of cats were abused and killed as part of a continuing taxpayer-funded experiment.

Truth Will Out

The ads show a gentle tabby named Double Trouble restrained in a bag with a steel post screwed into her skull. It's just one of the photos that PETA obtained following a three-year legal battle against UW. They were taken by the experimenters as part of an appalling project in which cats also have steel coils implanted in their eyes and electrodes inserted into their brains, are starved for days at a time, and are intentionally deafened.

Following complaints by PETA and a former UW veterinarian, the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Agriculture are investigating apparent violations of federal animal welfare regulations and misuse of federal funding related to these horrible experiments. After UW officials fought for years to keep the photographic evidence of Double Trouble's wretched life and protracted death secret, PETA's ads are showing their friends and neighbors exactly how cats are tormented and killed behind the school's laboratory doors.

What You Can Do

Learn more about UW's shameful secrets, and please urge the federal government to stop funding this primitive and lethal experiment.

As ever-more people join PETA and New Yorkers for Clean, Livable & Safe Streets (NYCLASS) in calling for a ban on New York's horse-drawn carriages, Alec Baldwin is taking advocacy for horses to primetime.

© StarMaxInc.com

In an upcoming episode of 30 Rock, people across the country will hear Alec's character, Jack Donaghy, call horse-drawn carriages "rolling torture wagons for nature's most dignified creature." That's the perfect way to describe the disgusting little business that forces horses to trudge along in all weather extremes, inhaling exhaust fumes and risking becoming one of the horses who are killed or injured by cars.

Here's what Alec had to say about the upcoming episode:

So make like Kenneth the page and do as Mr. Donaghy says. If you live in New York, please contact your City Council representatives and urge them to pass Intro. 86A. If you are outside New York, please sign NYCLASS' petition to ban horse-drawn carriages.