Written by PETA
Over the weekend, all the contestants in Milwaukee's Brew City Salmon Tournament got a little something to take home with them—even if they didn't manage to hook, suffocate, and kill any sea kittens.
PETA took to the skies over Lake Michigan with an airplane banner urging tournament participants to look at angling from a different angle by imagining if the shoe were on the other foot (fin?).
So maybe the message isn't about shoes and feet so much as about turning the other cheek? Of course, if it had been up to me, I'd have gone with a banner asking the question on everyone's mind: Do anglers have small rods?
To show the world that you have a big heart (among other organs) when it comes to fish, start here.
Written by Jeff Mackey
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.
President Obama's decision to allow oil and gas drilling along the East Coast isn't sitting well with some politicians and environmentalists, who worry that new infrastructure and possible oil spills will harm the environment and animals. But there's a bigger culprit: factory farming.
More than one-third of all the fossil fuels produced in the U.S. are used to raise animals for food, and factory-farm waste lagoons are a leading source of water pollution in the U.S. People can best help conserve resources, save the environment, and save animals' lives by kicking the meat and dairy addiction. To spread the word, PETA has asked the Department of the Interior to "dress up" oil rigs with educational banners and to serve only vegan meals aboard the drilling rigs.
Written by Heather Moore
The following is a guest post from PETA Prime's Steve Martindale.
Cats, dogs, raccoon dogs, rabbits, and other animals are skinned alive in China for their fur. This fur is exported to consumers in the U.S. and abroad and often dyed to look like the fur of other animals. It's sometimes even deliberately mislabeled as synthetic! More than half the fur garments sold in the U.S. are imported from China, where more than 2 million cats and hundreds of thousands of dogs each year suffer through a miserable life and an excruciatingly painful death as victims of the fur trade. While other sources of fur are unconscionably cruel as well, few do as much as the slaughter of dogs and cats to shake consumers out of complacency.
The cultural and economic inertia driving the Chinese fur trade is daunting—but with your help, we can slow down this juggernaut through dedicated efforts to educate consumers about the true price of fur. We do see glimmers of hope, and you and I can take action right now in many ways. Our new Web site is helping to raise awareness about the cruelty involved in the bloody fur industry.
Oh, sweet irony: Just weeks after Canadian Fisheries Minister Gail Shea gave the green light for sealers to kill an additional 50,000 seals, officials have announced that they will likely have to call off this year's massacre early because of a lack of buyers for seal fur! All that hard work by friends of seals is finally paying off.
PETA U.K. worked to push the European Union to ban products made from seals, and that ban, combined with the ever-increasing number of people who refuse to buy real fur, has dealt a crushing blow to the seal-fur industry. According to one sealer, "[T]here's no market for seal pelts this year." And according to one estimate, fewer than 15 percent of the projected number of seals will be bludgeoned to death this year!
Is the last gong sounding? Will Canadian officials stop the cruel and senseless seal slaughter forever? Let's keep the pressure on by writing to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and demanding that he put an end to this dying event once and for all.
Written by Lindsay Pollard-Post
PETA's forecast for SeaWorld San Antonio—cloudy with a chance of freedom:
On Saturday, PETA's "Let Orcas Out of Prison" banner flew across the sky while dedicated PETA supporters on the ground spread the word that trainers and animals will continue to get hurt or die until SeaWorld frees the animals to sanctuaries.
Coastal sanctuaries are the only humane places for the wild animals who are currently used by SeaWorld and other parks and who suffer for years in confined, unnatural conditions. One psychologist has pointed out that Tilikum—the captive orca who killed a SeaWorld trainer—is so traumatized from the shock of his capture, the disruption of his natural development, and his more than 30 years of imprisonment in a concrete pool that if he were human, he would undoubtedly be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
SeaWorld's continued exploitation of these sensitive animals is nothing more than a callous way to turn a cheap buck. Please don't support it.
Written by Logan Scherer
At 5' 4", I'm often the shortest person in a room, so I've frequently resorted to the maxim "good things come in small packages," but I'll admit it: Even I'm loving all 828 meters of the Burj Khalifa—which just opened in Dubai. The Burj Khalifa is the tallest building in the world and is breaking all sorts of world records—the highest occupied floor, the tallest service lift, and the world's highest observation deck—and, if Emaar Properties agrees to PETA's proposal it could break one more: world's longest banner.
None of the Burj Khalifa statistics are as astounding as the number of sheep who die every year on the traumatizing and grueling journey from Australia to their slaughter in the Middle East after they are deemed unprofitable to wool farmers. The cramped, suffocating conditions on live-export ships make the recent TSA regulations look like travel perks. In one year alone, 35,000 sheep die from starvation or disease or are trampled to death by other sheep. Those who survive the trip are dragged off the ships, thrown into the backs of trucks and cars, and eventually have their throats cut while they are still conscious. At least we survive the body scans.
Beachgoers in Fort Myers and Pensacola today got the envious privilege of being able to see planes hired by PETA flying up and down the shoreline towing signs reading "8 REASONS TO BOYCOTT KFC," and featuring a demonic, blood-soaked "Colonel Sanders" in the act of stabbing a chicken. So without further ado:
I never got to see anything that fun when I lived in Pensacola, though there were a lot of orange people....
Posted by Sarah King
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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.