In England, they do Mother’s Day differently (i.e., they actually celebrate it on the right date). And with Mothering Sunday coming up across the pond, PETA Europe have put together an incredibly striking demonstration to draw attention to the horrible suffering of mother pigs in gestation crates. My friend Alexia has the full story over on her blog Fish & Chimps, but here’s a quick look at the amazing demonstration that’s been getting tons of coverage for pigs abused on factory farms.

Sure, if the signs were a little different and our girls weren’t drop dead gorgeous, it could be mistaken for a Hooters audition, but lucky for us—and the animals—the girls are super hot and instead of “Fried Pickles and Chicken Wangs” their signs read: “Fur Out Love In”.

Our traveling campaigners are on a nationwide anti-fur tour right now, and oddly enough, they are getting crazy amounts of attention at every stop. Here’s an article from Austin. Enjoy.

Oh man . . . sad, weird news. As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, Anna Nicole Smith passed away today. And I’m sure everyone in the world will have an opinion on how and why she died so young.

She worked with PETA on a lot of campaigns over the years, and as strange as it may sound, I always thought she was an absolute perfect fit for us, because just like PETA, you couldn’t ignore her and, love her or hate her, everyone had an opinion. What you see is what you get—I loved that about her.

I always got a kick out of the stories from my friend Michael, who worked with Anna Nicole on all of her PETA projects, and thinking back on it now, she really did a lot for PETA and for animals all over the world.

She spoke out against Iams for its cruel animal tests, spoke up for baby seals in Canada, and gave fur-wearing celebrities an earful, but in my mind her crowning achievement was this amazing anti-fur ad.

After being exposed to animal rights over the years, Anna Nicole even became a vegetarian, and was nominated for the 2006 World’s Sexiest Vegetarian, and looking at her ad you can certainly see why.

It's a tragedy when anyone passes away before their time, but with Anna Nicole, the animals have lost a true sympathiser, and PETA has lost a good friend. We’ll miss you, Anna.

Going vegetarian, that is. A friend of mine from Cleveland sent me this news clip about teenage vegetarians, and it made my morning. Working for PETA, of course I hear stories all the time about the growth of vegetarianism among kids, particularly teenagers, and the folks at peta2 can hardly keep up with their growth—how about zero to 800,000 peta2 e-news subscribers in four years? But it was nice to see the media taking notice of what we’ve known for years . . .

Anyway, enjoy the clip:

Here at PETA, we track trends and statistics on the use of every species used for fur, and sometimes the findings of our research can be a total bummer, like when we uncovered the horrible abuse of dogs and cats for fur in China.

But more and more we are finding that designers and society in general are turning away from the cruelty of fur, and consequently, entire species of animals are being spared. Take, for instance, the great news released yesterday in Dallas, TX, where the findings of a very scientific years-long study revealed the following:

This is a great day indeed. It always warms our hearts here at PETA when even just one species receives a little bit of justice in the world. ... Yes, even when it happens to be a fictional species popularized by a movie.

And just in case you’ve never seen a liger (or Napoleon Dynamite), here is a very realistic artistic rendering of the rare and elusive species. Meeeeeeeeowwww!

UPDATE: OK, so I’ve received a lot of e-mails. ... Apparently, ligers aren’t fictional at all. Readers have just informed me that, among other things:

• Ligers, unlike most hybrids, can reproduce, resulting in either li-ligers (lion and liger) or ti-ligers (tiger and liger).
• Like tigers, but unlike lions, ligers enjoy swimming.
• Ligers grow much larger than lions and even larger than the largest tigers.

Who knew?

Lost season premiere tonight folks! I was a casual fan of the show until a weekend-long season 1 & 2 marathon turned me into a full-on addict. Now, let’s just say that 10pm tonight can’t get here fast enough.

What triggered the aforementioned binge weekend was when Dominic Monaghan shot a pro-wildlife ad for PETA. It's pretty damn wonderful anytime a celebrity takes time out of their schedule to speak up for animals, but Dominic really takes it a step further. Check out this interview about why he did the ad:

And if you need me between 10 and 11 tonight, don’t bother calling. I’ve got a TV date with my girl. The beer and catnip are already on ice.

In some ways, there's just so much to say about Rocket Boy, and yet now that I'm sitting down to write about it, it kind of leaves me a little speechless. Rocket Boy was an ad that we created about 10 years ago (when I was but a Rocket Boy myself) to highlight the connection between eating meat and impotence, and it recently resurfaced in all its glory when some genius in our Campaigns Department dug it up and circulated it around the office today. The Rocket Boy ad comes from the same brilliant minds that brought you "The Three Stages of a Weiner," and "I Threw a Party but the Meat-Eaters Couldn't Come."

Please direct all complaints to WTFRocketBoy@peta.org, with the subject line "Please, please, please stop with the impotence jokes already. Think of the children!" And without further ado ... Rocket Boy, ladies and gentlemen:

A friend of mine who worked on the Marc Bouwer/PETA show on Friday is still in New York for the rest of Fashion Week. Last night, she went to some trés chic afterparty at the Roseland Ballroom where she reported that what stood out even more than the coked-out models were "the frumpy fur-wearers who looked out of place amidst New York’s trendiest fashionistas, who were by and large fur-free."

Apparently these "asshole" stickers have become the must-have accessory of the season for anyone stupid enough to still wear fur. She says they've been showing up on every fur coat she sees ...

Europe's biggest turkey killer, Bernard Matthews, is back in the news. And oddly enough, this time it's not because their workers were filmed kicking birds and using pipes as baseball bats to hit them, but because government veterinarians have confirmed bird flu at a poultry farm in the UK.

So my friends Anita and Lucy at PETA Europe jumped into action and have been doing these “biohazard” demonstrations outside grocery stores in London to let the public know that there is a simple solution to this whole bird flu mess. Here are a couple of pics from yesterday’s demo.

Not to get all doomsday on you, but even our very own US Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt called the likelihood of an influenza pandemic "very high, some say even certain." Yes, bird flu is serious problem and all that, but it just seems like such a simple choice to me: we can either run around in these absurd looking masks all the time like these people

Or we can go vegetarian. Tofu anyone?

Every now and then I’m struck by just how much work we get done at PETA. Especially when we have weeks like we had last week: We won the Pom campaign, Smithfield Foods announced that it's phasing out gestation crates for pigs, and CareerBuilder finally stopped its abusive chimpanzee ads.

Much as I'd like to take credit for all this stuff myself, the fact is that none of it would even get off the ground without the vision and the amazing work ethic of PETA's president, Ingrid Newkirk. She’s the first one here every morning and the last to leave, and she's always first in line for “extra” activities like bagging straw for cold local dogs or protesting at the local KFC. Right now she’s on a nationwide book tour promoting her latest book, and there was a pretty great news story about that the other night, which you can check out here.

Anyway, my point here is that Ingrid is amazing and inspiring and all things like that. On a completely unrelated note, Ingrid, it feels like a really long time since I last had a raise ...