There are two things I really like about the story that hit the wires this week reporting New York’s recent ban on anal and genital electrocution of animals for fur. The first thing’s kind of obvious: Animals on fur farms in New York won’t be electrocuted any more (they’ll still suffer, but their deaths will now, hopefully, be just a bit less painful). In case you haven’t kept up to date on electrocution techniques, this isn’t like sticking your finger into a wall socket: The fur farmers attach one electrode to the fox’s or raccoon’s ear or muzzle and stick the other one in the animal’s anus or vagina. The result is a dagger-like heart attack without loss of consciousness. On one fur farm we investigated, the farmer plugged the chinchillas into the wall socket and timed it by listening to a song on the radio—then skinned them without checking to see if they were dead.

But the thing that should be really remarkable for most people reading this story is not the fact that New York has banned electrocution—but the implication that this is still legal everywhere else. That’s right. New York is now the only state where anally and genitally electrocuting fur-bearing animals (fur farmers do it this way so they won’t damage the pelts) could get you into trouble.

As my friend Melissa put it when she was interviewed for the AP piece, "Anal electrocution is common practice in fur farms across the world. A lot of these methods aren't effective and these animals will wake up while they are being skinned."

That’s all. I just wanted to drive home that point. It’s awesome that New York is leading the way here, and hopefully other states will soon follow suit. But this is also a good opportunity to store away that little tidbit about anal and genital electrocution being 100 percent legal in 49 out of 50 states—just in case anyone ever tries to tell you that wearing fur is anything other than reprehensible.

… it stars me, so it must be awesome. Actually, it stars a bunch of people at the forefront of PETA’s work to help animals, who really know what they’re talking about. I just get to introduce them. This month’s Podcast features PETA Vice President Bruce Friedrich talking about how to be an effective advocate for animals (e.g., more with the positive outreach, less with the vegan police force), and it’s really compelling stuff. So if you’ve got 20 minutes to spare this afternoon, get your headphones on, pull up an Excel spreadsheet to make it look like you’re working, and listen to Bruce’s Effective Advocacy tips. Then let me know what you think.

Look out, ladies and gentlemen, here comes Madonna. In a £35,000 chinchilla fur coat. For those of you doing the math, that means Madge needs to have more than 60 furry animals electrocuted just to keep her warm on a Wednesday night—which means that if you're planning on being anywhere near her U.K. residence this Christmas, you might want to hide your babies and your family pets. The story, such as it is, is that Madonna was spotted last Wednesday at a Mayfair restaurant called Cecconi's positively drowning in the dead animals, which had been sewn together for her by the designers at Fendi.

Why would anyone with a shred of decency ever consider wearing such a thing? The prevailing theory around here is that when it comes to making headlines, Madonna is just too old to flash her beaver like Britney Spears, so she brought out the chinchilla. (Oh, zing! See what I did there?)

Anyway, we fired off a letter to her this morning to ask her to just for God's sake, stop it, and you can read that here. If you'd like to let her know how you feel yourself, you can contact her using the following information:

Liz Rosenberg (Madonna's US publicist)
liz.rosenberg@wbr.com

Barbara Charone (Madonna's UK publicist)
bc@mbcpr.com