Written by PETA
No animals were arrested in the making of this protest, but yesterday in Zuccotti Park Liberty Square, a "pig," "cow," and "chicken" joined the Occupy Wall Street protesters to push for more corporate accountability. Our animals were at the center of a whirlwind of police, photographers, protesters, and intrigued passersby who stopped to read the animals' posters and pick up copies of PETA's vegetarian/vegan starter kit.
Bearing delicious vegan pizzas, the animals—representing 100 percent of the animals raised for food in the U.S.—brought attention to the fact that corporate greed is responsible for billions of animals' being treated like cogs in a meat machine rather than the intelligent, sensitive individuals they are.
On factory farms, pigs have their tails and testicles cut off without being given any painkillers; cows are fattened for slaughter on barren, filthy feed lots; and chickens are crammed by the tens of thousands into airless sheds, where their accumulated waste results in ammonia-laden air that burns their eyes and throats.
To opt out of the corporate abuse of animals, order your own free vegetarian/vegan starter kit and get busy breaking down the barricades to protecting animals, your health, and the planet.
Written by Heather Faraid Drennan
When pop sensation Ke$ha learned that McDonald's McCruelty is spending more than $1 billion on renovating its restaurants while still refusing to require its suppliers to upgrade to a less cruel method of slaughtering chickens, she fired off a letter to McDonald's CEO Jim Skinner calling out the company for its "Sleazy" behavior. The singer is even putting her money where her mouth is by offering McDonald's cash to help with the transition to a more humane slaughter system: "I may not have the $ that the Golden Arches has to throw around, but I'd be glad to lend a hand in helping bring your suppliers' slaughter practices into the 21st century."
The social, inquisitive chickens killed for McNuggets have their throats cut, many have their legs and wings broken, and many are dunked into the scalding-hot water of defeathering tanks while still conscious.. Meanwhile, Skinner and McDonald's continue to ignore the recommendation of the company's own animal welfare panel, which has endorsed a slaughter method that renders the birds unconscious at the start of the slaughtering process. This method, which has been approved the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is already in use by McDonald's suppliers in Europe, so there's no excuse for allowing American suppliers to continue with such cruelty.
Tell McDonald's to require American suppliers to switch to the less cruel slaughter method. As Ke$ha might say, "TiK ToK," the switch can't come a moment too soon for chickens.
The latest issue of PETA's Animal Times magazine just rolled off the presses, and the PETA Files is offering you a sneak peak inside. In addition to campaign news and updates, investigative reports, and tasty recipes, this issue includes an exclusive excerpt from PETA President Ingrid E. Newkirk's latest book, The PETA Practical Guide to Animal Rights. In this excerpt, Ingrid talks about a personable rooster named Lucie, who changed the lives of the family that had the good fortune to adopt him:
A man selling chicks under a bridge sold Lucie for a dollar to a little girl. … She put him … in the basement in a shoe box with air holes and a tissue for a blanket …. The next day, the girl's mother Barbara Munroe, realized that the chick was freezing. She made a bed in her night table drawer .... Finally, Lucie went to sleep.
Barbara took to carrying Lucie around in her hand. He always wanted to be with people. "The most amazing thing to me," says Barbara, "was the way Lucie adapted to suburban life, sitting in a car like a perfect gentleman or on the sofa while the family read or watched television."
. . .
When Barbara would come home from work, she often saw Lucie sitting on the back of a chair in an upstairs window, watching for her. By the time that she got in, he was down in the kitchen, jumping up and down, greeting her.
If people in the house raised their voices, Lucie chimed in loudly. It was almost impossible to shout over him, and usually everyone ended up laughing.
Barbara's daughter kept her bedroom door closed. Lucie hated that …. Every once in awhile, the girl forgot to close the door. Lucie would run in and jump on her bed but remain very quiet, so as not to alert her.
All chickens have the potential of Lucie or more, if allowed to live a natural life—by which I mean, not confined to a tiny wire cage or to a filthy, ammonia-filled shed crammed in with thousands of other birds. The same is true of all animals we think of as "food." It is just that we never get to know them.
Want more? An annual subscription to Animal Times can be yours for just $16. What a bargain! Written by Alisa Mullins
Last weekend, a flock of really "angry birds" showed that green pigs aren't the enemy—the Colonel is. The birds landed at a San Jose, California, KFC to make the point that the fast-food chain's suppliers use a cruel method of slaughter in which chickens have their throats cut while they're still conscious and millions of birds are scalded to death in defeathering tanks. When one passerby heard about this, she vowed never to eat at KFC again.
Because the voltage levels of electric stun tanks in U.S. slaughterhouses are kept at only a fraction of the level needed to render chickens insensible to pain, birds are usually paralyzed but still conscious when their throats are cut. Government studies show that birds feel pain after being shocked, even if they can't move. If the birds miss the mechanical cutting blade, they are alive when they are immersed in tanks of scalding-hot water intended to remove their feathers after they are dead.
Tell KFC that until it agrees to switch to the less cruel slaughter method that PETA is recommending—which is already in use in other slaughterhouses—it can take a flying leap.
Written by Michelle Sherrow
With a terse dismissal, the State Fair of Texas denied PETA's application to display our own version of a 4-H booth at the upcoming event. Fair officials must not want visitors to know that the cows, sheep, goats, and chickens 4-H participants have spent countless hours bonding with will ultimately make their way to a blood-soaked killing floor, just as most animals raised for food do.
Our four "H's" stand for "hellish for animals," "hazardous to the environment," "heart attack–inducing," and "hypocritical for teaching kids to care about only certain animals and to disregard others." We planned to screen Glass Walls and hand out free copies of our vegetarian/vegan starter kits.
I suppose that, to paraphrase Jack Nicholson, the State Fair of Texas can't handle the truth. But we think their patrons can—or at least their hearts can.
Written by Jennifer O'Connor
Mahatma Gandhi said, "The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated." What, then, can we surmise about the U.S., where 59 billion animals a year suffer intensive confinement, are deprived of all that is natural to them, have their bodies mutilated by dehorning, castration, ear cropping, and more, all before they are killed for a fleeting taste of flesh? October 2, Gandhi's birthday, marks World Farm Animals Day, a day to honor Gandhi's advocacy of nonviolence and vegetarianism and to remember the animals killed for what he called "the satisfaction of our bodily wants."
The plain facts are appalling: Every year in the U.S. alone, more than 7 billion chickens and 275 million turkeys have their legs slammed into shackles and their throats cut before being immersed—often while still conscious—in scalding water to remove their feathers. Many of the 118 million pigs killed annually are improperly stunned and scream in pain as they are scalded to death. More than 39 million cows are hung upside down and left to dangle with all their body weight suspended by one leg before their throats are cut and they are skinned and gutted, some aware of what is happening to them as their bodies are hacked apart.
If humanity is to make real moral progress, we must treat animals as sentient beings whose lives are their own and do not belong to us. This World Farm Animals Day, we're trying to get 10,000 people to visit Meat.org and watch the site's "Glass Walls" video. Please share the page on Facebook, on Twitter, and in any other way you that can imagine to get the word out there!
In Wednesday's New York Times dining section, someone thought it would be a riot to take the decapitated, amputated, defeathered corpse of a chicken and prop the body up in a sexually suggestive "come hither" pose.
PETA President Ingrid E. Newkirk was not amused. "When I saw it, I just couldn't believe that an editor of The New York Times would find it acceptable," she told The Atlantic Wire. "It's downright offensive, not just to people who care about animals but to anyone. It's a plucked, beheaded, young chicken …. [That's] necrophilia. It's not amusing. It's just sick."
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Some have suggested that PETA, which has never shied away from using nudity to make a point, is in no position to cast stones. Excuse me? A key difference between PETA's ads and the New York Times' photo is that our models are willing participants who are still very much alive.
Is it a sign of how desensitized our society has become to the animals who are violently slaughtered for food that someone would think it a "sexy" joke to pose a young chicken—a baby, really, as chickens are slaughtered at 6 to 8 weeks old—like the star of a lingerie commercial. But picture in this bird's place the decapitated, amputated, skinned corpse of a puppy or a kitten. Would anybody be laughing—or licking their chops? Doubt it.
Written by Alisa Mullins
KFC has had to pull false advertising from its Australian website after a flap with a consumer watchdog group.
KFC had touted that chickens raised for the brand were "free to roam" on farms. But cramming chickens so tightly inside filthy, windowless sheds that they can barely take a step or lift a wing doesn't exactly qualify as "free roaming." When the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission launched legal action against a KFC supplier for false claims on the supplier's website, KFC backpedaled.
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If only KFC were forced to do the same stateside, where the company has refused the recommendations of its own animal welfare advisors to eliminate the worst abuses of chickens, such as scalding birds to death.
Until KFC stops the charade, tell the company that you aren't buying it, and ask it to eliminate the worst abuses of chickens.
Ryan Gosling has certainly earned his cape this month. First, he broke up a street fight in Manhattan. Then, the Academy Award-nominated actor leapt to the defense of chickens and turkeys on factory farms. Gosling wrote a letter to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) on PETA's behalf calling on the agency to revoke its approval of a foam-based extermination method that kills birds by submerging them in foam to slowly suffocate them. This process can take up to 15 minutes and is as traumatic and panic-inducing as killing birds by choking them, strangling them, smothering them, or burying them alive.
"If dogs and cats were killed in this way, the person committing these acts would be charged with cruelty to animals," Gosling wrote. He went on to urge the USDA to put its stamp of approval on a less cruel alternative that uses carbon dioxide to painlessly render birds unconscious and that has already been approved by veterinary experts.
This isn't the first time that Gosling has flexed his impressive muscles in birds' behalf. He previously wrote to KFC and McDonald's urging the fast-food chains to adopt PETA's proposed animal welfare reforms.
We just love a guy who has such a drive to stick up for chicks. You can be a hero for animals, too—don't patronize McDonald's or KFC.
PETA wishes a very happy 60th birthday to rock legend Chrissie Hynde, who, when she isn't using her beautiful voice to sing platinum hits, uses it to stop cruelty to animals. From opening her vegan restaurant, VegiTerranean, to having her hit song "I'll Stand by You" featured in a heartbreaking public service announcement, the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer has spent decades advocating for animals. Chrissie's actions for animals are too numerous to list, but here are our six favorites:
We know that animals would agree with us, Chrissie—you rock!
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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