Written by Jeff Mackey
Update 2:
Following a successful stint at the Kansas State Fair—during which people were able to watch video footage of factory farms—PETA has voluntarily dismissed its free-speech lawsuit against the fair. Many fairgoers were pleased to receive the free vegan and vegetarian recipes. Most tellingly, the majority of the farmers who watched PETA's footage admitted that they couldn't pledge that their own animals weren't being slaughtered in the same violent and haphazard ways.
While maintaining that the fair's requirement to screen the video inside a tent constitutes a content-based restriction in violation of free-speech rights, PETA is pleased with the final outcome. In fact, publicity over the fair's censorship may well have driven more traffic to the booth, allowing PETA to reach an even wider range of Kansans with information about the cruelty of factory farming and slaughter!
Update: After Kansas State Fair officials failed to respond to letters asking them to remove restrictions forcing PETA to shield video footage showing animal slaughter from fairgoers who pass by its booth, we filed a federal lawsuit to stop the fair from violating our right to free speech. PETA also submitted a motion asking the court to block the restrictions imposed on our booth for this year's fair, which starts September 7.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Kansas and Western Missouri is representing PETA for free, along with Kansas City law firm Copilevitz & Canter. As Doug Bonney, legal director for the ACLU of Kansas and Western Missouri, put it, "I've never seen anything like this—this is a classic content-based restriction on what the speaker can say, which I think is unconstitutional."
We'll keep you posted!
Originally posted August 16:
Turns out that Iowa's not the only state that objects to the idea of fair visitors learning the ugly truth about how meat is made. After the Kansas State Fair sent a letter insisting that PETA could have a booth only if any pictures or videos "that depict animal slaughter, animal harvest, hide removal, or show or depict live animals being decapitated, dismembered or butchered" be shielded from view unless people specifically choose to view them, our legal team fired back a reply demanding that the decision be reversed because it violates PETA's constitutional right to free speech.
Here's the deal: The state has established the fair as a public forum, and the right to free speech requires that there be no content-based censorship in a public forum. Consider, too, that fair officials don't appear to be making the same demand of other exhibitors, meaning that it's only PETA's content that they're trying to squelch. Plus, fairgoers deserve to know how much the animals who were raised and killed for their cheeseburgers and chili dogs suffered—though I guess that last point isn't actually a legal issue.
Looking for an effective, unmistakable way to express your disgust at the way animals are abused on factory farms and in slaughterhouses? Go vegan!
Update: The booth reopened on Saturday after fair officials relented and asked PETA to return. Once again, Iowa State Fair visitors were able to see farm workers' callous behavior and unlawful cruelty to animals for themselves via the uncensored undercover video footage shown at the booth.
Originally posted August 10:
Fairgoers are used to seeing the traditional 4-H booths, but the Iowa State Fair was so shocked by PETA's decidedly nontraditional version—which showed PETA's "Glass Walls" video exposing the horrific cruelty of the meat trade—that everyone's favorite animal rights group was banished from the fairgrounds.
Supposedly, the raw language used by one factory-farm worker in the undercover video footage—he drops an F-bomb while describing the difficulty of snapping turkeys' necks—proved too much for Iowans' delicate ears. Then again, the ejection may have been due more to what the video showed than what was being said.
Iowa has already shown intolerance for finding out what goes on behind the scenes of the meat industry by passing an "ag gag" law, making it illegal to photograph or film factory-farm and slaughterhouse conditions. And people who've already stopped by the booth learned what the law is designed to conceal because "Glass Walls" includes video footage from a PETA investigation that documented how pigs at an Iowa Hormel supplier were being beaten and abused by workers, leading to convictions for livestock abuse and neglect.
Interestingly, PETA was the only "vendor" at the fair not selling anything but instead trying to educate the Iowa public about the darker side of agriculture, which is of increasing concern to the nation. Instead of peddling cotton candy or corn dogs, PETA just offered free food for thought and paid for the privilege of doing so. It seems that fair officials were more alarmed by the message and the throngs of people the booth attracted—especially teens.
It's a shame that now those teens may not have the chance to learn how the meat business hurts animals—and works to co-opt young people with not-so-subtle propaganda. 4-H offers a lot of great programs for kids, but participants in its agricultural programs spend numerous hours bonding with cows, sheep, goats, and chickens who will ultimately make their way to a blood-soaked killing floor, just as most animals raised for food do.
That's why in PETA's booth, the four H's stood for "Hell for animals," "Heart attack–inducing," "Hazard to the environment," and "Hypocritical for teaching kids to care about only certain animals and to disrespect others."
Nobel Prize–winning physician, theologian, and vegetarian Dr. Albert Schweitzer once said, "The man who has become a thinking being feels a compulsion to give every will-to-live the same reverence for life that he gives to his own." It was Schweitzer's "reverence for life" that inspired our pals at PETA U.K. not only to sponsor the attendance of a vegetarian student at this week's Albert Schweitzer's Leadership for Life International Youth Leadership Conference in Dublin but also to place an ad in the event's program in Schweitzer's honor.
Albert Schweitzer: © LOC, LC-USZ62-30537 Background: © iStockphoto.com/Hiroyuki Akimoto
Harley, the sponsored student, has been vegetarian ever since a friend urged her to watch some PETA videos, from which she learned about the cruelty of factory farms and slaughterhouses. During her sophomore year, Harley petitioned her high school to introduce more vegan options to the cafeteria, collecting 320 signatures from a student body of 400 people!
From the time he was a child, Schweitzer was horrified by the violence he witnessed against animals and would likely be even more disgusted by today's factory farms and slaughterhouses. Chickens, turkeys, pigs, cows, and fish are packed into small cages, filthy sheds, or putrid fish farms for their entire lives—at slaughter, animals often have their throats cut open while they are still conscious or are scalded to death or skinned alive.
Going vegan might not make you a genius—but it will make the world a better, more compassionate place, which is rather brilliant, don't you think? And PETA can help you get started!
PETA made sure that attendees at this week's annual meeting of KFC's parent company, Yum! Brands, in Louisville, Kentucky, would have something to chew on besides their cruelly obtained drumsticks and wings.
As shareholders of Yum! Brands stock, PETA can attend the company's annual meeting and ask a question during the Q&A. So Yum! bigwigs and stockholders got an earful from PETA when it detailed how chickens used to supply KFC restaurants spend their entire short lives mired in their own waste in cramped filthy sheds on factory farms, only to be hung upside down, sustain broken wings and legs, and often end up scalded to death in slaughterhouse defeathering tanks. PETA's representative then asked when the company will make the simple, badly needed changes that were recommended by KFC's own animal welfare advisers (who understandably resigned in frustration).
Join Pink, Sir Paul McCartney, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the Black Eyed Peas, and many others in telling KFC to do right by chickens.
Written by Michelle Kretzer
You've played Words With Friends, but what about lights with pigs? A new app called "Pig Chase" puts players finger-to-snout with real pigs on farms.
A player moves a ball of light on the screen, and the light is displayed on a large touch-sensitive panel in the pig's pen. The human player can see the pig's snout as it touches the screen. The human player must use his or her fingers to keep the ball of light near the pig's snout in order to help the pig move the ball of light into a goal triangle with his or her snout. When successful, the pig is treated to a bright, colorful light display.
Pig Chase was designed to help satisfy a European Union directive requiring farmers to provide pigs with entertainment to lessen the stress that causes pigs to attack each other in cramped factory-farm conditions.
While a game can't change the intensive confinement, multiple mutilations, and filthy conditions to which pigs are subjected on factory farms, perhaps it will help people start to see pigs for the bright, inquisitive animals they are and help pigs pass the time. People may start to realize that if we wouldn't eat the dog we play fetch with, we shouldn't eat the pig we play chase with. And that will make a big difference for pigs on farms.
Written by PETA
Hundreds of pigs were burned alive when an electrical fire destroyed the barn in which they were crammed at a factory farm in Utah operated by Murphy-Brown, LLC, a subsidiary of notorious pig abuser Smithfield Foods, Inc. Gruesome pictures taken by a news crew on the scene show a mass of charred bodies piled on the floor of the building.
An emergency response coordinator for the area reported that he thought some of the pigs had survived, but considering the fact that any survivors face a fate that is hardly less ghastly, it is hard to hope for that. As one former Smithfield employee recounted:
“[P]igs are shocked with a stun gun and thrown onto a conveyor belt, where their legs and feet are tied and their necks are broken in a bizarre machine. Not even a second later, they're hung upside-down on a meat hook and sliced open. Their guts are scooped out and thrown into a trash can, which ends up next door to be processed as ‘other’ pig products. The swinging bodies are still twitching as they continue on to be cut up into smaller pieces. Blood and guts are everywhere.”
Please share this post with your meat-eating friends and tell them that if they are opposed to cruelty to animals, they should put their opposition into action by ordering PETA’s free vegetarian/vegan starter kit today.
Written by Michelle Sherrow
Update: Iowa’s general assembly adjourned for the year on Thursday without voting on HF 589, essentially killing the “ag gag” bill.
New video footage shot during an undercover investigation on an Iowa pig factory farm should be enough to make anyone who isn't profiting from the abuse of pigs swear off pork chops.
The footage shot by Mercy for Animals shows similar abuses to those documented by PETA during investigations at pig farms in North Carolina and Iowa in 2007 and 2008. Workers are seen kicking piglets and hurling them across the room. The piglets have their tails cut off and testicles ripped out by hand, without being given any painkillers, and some piglets later die from herniated intestines.
As is standard practice on factory farms, mother pigs are crammed into stalls so small that they cannot even turn around. Constant pregnancies leave the sows so weak and exhausted that they often suffer from prolapsed uteruses.
A proposed "ag gag" ("gag" is appropriate, if you've seen the footage) bill in Iowa would make taking a photograph of or filming on a farm illegal, which would effectively keep anyone still eating meat from seeing what happens to pigs, chickens, and other animals every day of their lousy lives. PETA Vice President Dan Mathews has held news conferences in Iowa showing PETA's photos and video from Iowa farms, and his news conference in New York helped defeat a similar bill there. If you live in Iowa, please take a moment to urge your state senators to oppose HF 589.
Written by Heather Faraid Drennan
If there is one person who can command national attention for an issue, it is "queen of all media" Oprah Winfrey. That's why Saving America's Mustangs, a group run by PETA supporter Madeleine Pickens, has enlisted actors, musicians, and athletes to film an appeal to Oprah asking her to help them protect the few wild horses remaining in the West.
Just 100 years ago, there were 2 million free-roaming horses in and around Nevada. Today, there are fewer than 28,000. But that isn't stopping the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) from continuing to round up wild horses and confine them by the tens of thousands to holding pens, where they may be held for years before being sold. To get the horses into the corrals, workers rope, drag, and kick them and run them down with helicopters, killing some of them in the process. The roundups cost taxpayers $70 million per year. On July 1, the BLM will resume rounding up even more horses during foaling season.
Why is the BLM so hell-bent on rounding up wild horses? Two words: cattle ranchers. When horses compete with cows for grazing land, guess who ends up the loser? It's just one more of the many excellent reasons not to eat beef cows.
Oprah has done a wonderful job exposing the horrors of puppy mills, the Japanese dolphin slaughter, and factory farm cruelty. Will wild mustangs be the first animals to star on her new network? Stay tuned …
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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