Written by Michelle Kretzer
Like a good scare? If the same old haunted houses and rehashed slasher movies have you rolling your eyes, PETA has 10 scary spots guaranteed to make you scream like Jamie Lee Curtis. Let's start our virtual fright fest:
Anyone who has ever seen a horror flick knows that you never go into the barn. Good things do not happen there, unless you consider being mutilated a good thing. Anyway, didn't we learn anything about eating meat from Contagion?
I'd sooner spend a year trapped in Rihanna's warped "Disturbia" world than try to dodge the whips and chains in Ringling's house of horrors.
The bizarre and deadly experiments on cats that are going on behind closed doors at this school are like something out of Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory. But even Mary Shelley couldn't have dreamed up "science" this twisted.
Is there anything creepier than a clown? How about a clown with shackles, an electrified water bath, and a knife aimed at your throat?
Remember the iconic opening sequence in Saw in which two men are chained up in a restroom? They didn't last any time at all before one of them sawed off his own leg to get free. Just sayin'.
Jason Voorhees might be a knife-wielding maniac, but he's got nothing on Australian sheep farmers. Apparently, if they call it "mulesing," they can carve up their victims alive. (Shiver!)
© Patty Mark/alv.org.au
Even with Paramount's money, DreamWorks' special effects, and all the fake blood in Hollywood, Wes Craven couldn't create a gorier scene than the Canadian seal slaughter.
© Sea Shepherd Conservation Society
Do you find that the worst part of haunted houses is the beginning, when your whole group is smashed into that dark, tiny room before you start the tour? If you get claustrophobic just thinking about it, imagine if that dark, tiny room lasted for two years. It's getting hard to breathe …
People who have seen The Texas Chainsaw Massacre probably still shudder when they think about Leatherface. But even at his chainsaw-slinging worst, the skin-wearing psycho isn't as frightening as the slicing and dicing that goes on inside a slaughterhouse where cows are killed for their flesh and skin.
For horses made to pull carriages through New York's noisy, congested streets, every car seems like Christine—except Stephen King's horror flicks only last two hours, not nine hours a day, seven days a week.
© Barbara Grove
Getting chills yet?
Written by Ingrid E. Newkirk
Many PETA members have contacted us to ask whether they should support so-called "humane" meat. It's a question that we all should be asking because this issue is very important—particularly for the billions of animals who are killed for our plates every year.
If you look around, society is at a turning point. Everyone from the NFL's Arian Foster to Bill Clinton to Anne Hathaway is talking about how going vegan boosts one's energy and keeps one looking slim and healthy. Grocery stores are packed with tasty vegan foods, from faux meats such as vegan chicken and ribs to dairy-free products such as rice milk ice cream and vegan cheese! It's no longer a chore to ask for a vegan meal in restaurants, including steakhouses, and there are now vegan options at schools across the country. Some universities even have all-vegan cafeterias.
Now, more than ever before, it is time to be kind to animals by not paying someone else to slaughter them—something that happens even on so-called "humane" farms.
PETA has pushed hard and will continue to push hard to reduce the sum total of suffering in the meat, dairy, and egg industries—because that makes a huge difference if you are a pig or a chicken on a factory farm. We've stopped PETA protests outside Burger King or McDonald's restaurants when those companies agreed to reforms, but that doesn't mean that we would ever suggest eating meat from Burger King or anywhere else—because we know that massive suffering still goes into every bite. Yes, it's better to pay extra for an egg from a chicken who had a marginally less hideous life than one who suffered more, but we must do better by animals. In fact, we have yet to find a "humane" factory farm where animals don't have their tails cut off and their ears painfully notched, where they aren't debeaked, dehorned, or castrated without anesthesia, where they aren't kept in crowded conditions without sunlight or fresh air, where they don't have their beloved children taken away from them, where they aren't denied the companionship of others, where they aren't sent to a feedlot, or where they are instantly dispatched without the trauma of capture, the horror of transportation, or the terror of seeing other animals killed before suffering the same fate.
PETA has pushed for vegan living since our inception in 1980. Our motto is: "Animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, use for entertainment, or abuse in any other way." With so many vegan cookbooks and meal options available and with programs like the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine's 21-Day Vegan Kickstart and our wildly popular vegan starter kit, we can all help animals—and not miss a thing. Let's live and let live, and tell others to come along with us, reminding them that animals have emotions and needs just as human beings do.
There is no such thing as humane meat. Giving animals a few more inches of living space is simply not enough. Animals deserve more. The momentum is on our side, but it will take every one of us to bring this change about by being active advocates of animal rights. Thank you!
Kind regards,
Ingrid E. Newkirk
President
Written by Jeff Mackey
In 2008, when PETA offered a $1 million incentive to anyone who could develop a marketable in vitro (lab-grown) meat, there were some who scoffed. Since then, research into in vitro meat has exploded—the research, that is, not the labs—and the idea (along with PETA's offer) has shown up in The New Yorker and on TV shows ranging from Better Off Ted (R.I.P., Veridian Dynamics) to The Colbert Report.
Who's laughing now?
wwarby|cc by 2.0
Though no one has yet stepped up to claim the prize by the June 30, 2012, closing date, there has been so much encouraging progress that PETA has decided to extend the deadline until 2013. Several scientists appear to be getting close—the University of Missouri (Go, Tigers!) is a hotbed for in vitro meat research, for some reason—but if you think you can close the gap, get crackin'!
Even if you don't know a test tube from a champagne flute, you can help animals, your health, and the environment today by enjoying any of the delish vegan meats—from veggie burgers to faux hot dogs to chick'n nuggets—already in your grocer's freezer case. View or order PETA's free starter kit to learn more about meatless living!
Katherine Heigl loves Utah so much that she chose the state as the site of her 2007 wedding and later purchased a home there. But when Utah lawmakers proposed an "ag gag" bill that would make it a crime to shoot video on factory farms, Heigl wanted to let lawmakers know that kind citizens like her would not support it.
She penned a letter on PETA's behalf to Utah's state senators urging them to squelch House Bill (H.B.) 187 and allow people to continue to obtain video evidence of animal abuse so that authorities can prosecute the offenders.
As animals cannot defend themselves, the public must maintain its right to document illegal cruel practices in order to alert law enforcement to [their] existence. In 2008, my friends at PETA went undercover at a major pig farm in Iowa that supplies Hormel and found that workers were beating pigs with metal rods and jabbing clothespins into their eyes; one employee was even caught sexually abusing a pig with a cane. Because of this investigation, six workers were charged with a total of 22 counts of livestock neglect and abuse, and all of them admitted guilt. PETA worked hand in hand with local law enforcement to achieve these convictions, for which the undercover footage made the sheriff's job much easier. Please don't impede law enforcement by passing this terrible bill.
Cloris Leachman has already asked Utah lawmakers to dump the bill, which is on very shaky constitutional ground. Last year, when similar "ag gag" bills cropped up in Florida, Iowa, Minnesota, and New York, animal advocates defeated them, thanks in part to the work of kind folks like Cloris and Mary Matalin.
Help us defeat H.B. 187 in Utah too.
Last year, PETA and other animal advocates successfully defeated "ag gag" bills in Florida, New York, Minnesota, and Iowa. Now, another "ag gag" bill that would make it illegal to shoot video on a factory farm has just passed in the House of Representatives in Utah. And once again, we're fighting back against this unconstitutional measure.
Flush from her success in her home state of Iowa, Raising Hope star and longtime animal advocate Cloris Leachman penned a letter to Utah lawmakers on PETA's behalf urging them not to block people from gathering the evidence needed to prosecute animal abusers
I hope that Utah legislators recognize that with consumer demand for better treatment of animals, they must work to enforce and strengthen laws, not penalize those trying to expose cruel and illegal practices. Citizens' right to document cruelty to animals—wherever it occurs—is crucial in helping local, state, and federal officials enforce anti-cruelty laws.
Every PETA undercover investigation of factory farms has yielded evidence that workers were abusing animals. We recorded workers who sexually assaulted a pig with a cane, stomped on a turkey's head until her skull exploded, and spit tobacco into chickens' eyes and mouth. This indisputable proof of abuse is key to securing historic charges against and convictions of such abusers on cruelty-to-animals charges.
Utah residents, please ask your senators to vote against this bill and to continue to allow people to expose blatant cruelty to animals.
When students at China's Guangdong University of Foreign Studies bustled onto campus for open day, little did they know that their education would begin on the sidewalk.
Armed with hundreds of leaflets and stickers courtesy of PETA Asia-Pacific, an enterprising group of students flooded the campus with messages about protecting animals and the environment using the slogan "We all live under the same sky."
Considering how eagerly their receptive classmates grabbed information about factory farming, zoos, and other animal rights issues, it's safe to say that these students opened the school year with a bang.
If you know students who want to get active for animals, let them know that they can "take charge" by visiting peta2.com
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: Yvonne has come out of the woods and "turned herself in". She "apparently got tired of the loneliness" and hopped a fence to a farm where she grazed for awhile, and she is settling in at the Gut Aiderbichl animal sanctuary. Yvonne's son, who had been thought dead, was located by the sanctuary, and mother and son have been reunited in their new home.
It may sound like the storyline of a Disney movie, but a cow in Germany has been successfully hiding out in the woods for nearly four months after running away from a Bavarian farm, where she was being fattened for slaughter.
As Yvonne the cow eludes search teams, including the police, rescuers from an animal sanctuary, and even a helicopter equipped with a thermal camera, her escape and the subsequent search for her have generated an international media frenzy. There is even a hit song about Yvonne playing on German radio, telling her, "Don't let them take your freedom."
Authorities had previously ordered that Yvonne be shot on sight after she jumped in front of a police car, but the order was rescinded after animal rights advocates rallied to her defense, setting up Facebook pages devoted to saving her, and Germany's largest newspaper put up a reward for anyone who helped find her. If Yvonne is ever caught, she will spend the rest of her days at the Gut Aiderbichl Animal Sanctuary with her sister Waltraud and a calf named Waldi, who came from the same farm that Yvonne ran away from.
PETA Germany has talked to numerous reporters about Yvonne and has been quick to point out that she is no different from any other brainy bovine. Like Yvonne, all cows value their lives and do not want to suffer and die.
The average vegan saves 100 lives every year. To start saving cows like Yvonne yourself, order one of PETA's free vegetarian/vegan starter kits.
If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian. -Paul McCartney
All summer long, the millions of people who will visit Washington, D.C.'s National Mall will be greeted by PETA's arresting "Glass Walls" display across from the Museum of Natural History. With 12 massive panels and a large-screen television playing Sir Paul McCartney's "Glass Walls" DVD, the display causes passersby to stop to watch, talk to PETA staff, and take away copies of the video and vegetarian/vegan starter kits.
One mother walking with her teenage son stopped, pointed, and told him, "Watch—this is how animals are treated at slaughterhouses. This is terrible!" She said she was going vegan and left with information. A young boy also repeatedly brushed off his impatient father so that he could continue to scan the panels. A passing bike rider vowed never to eat chicken again after stopping to watch the section of the video about chickens.
In the first month alone, more than 10,000 copies of "Glass Walls" were distributed, along with similar numbers of vegetarian/vegan starter kits, free stickers, and other resources to help people transition to a vegan diet. We expect to distribute more than 50,000 DVDs before summer's end and change the minds and lives of thousands of people.
If you are in D.C. this summer, swing by the National Mall to check out the "Glass Walls" display or check it out online at Animal Liberation Project. You can also get the information from PETA's literature catalog and grab some extras to give to your friends.
The world didn't come to an end when road crews shut down 10 miles of one of Los Angeles' busiest freeways this past weekend, but the absence of the usual bumper-to-bumper traffic on the 405 was certainly an other-worldly scene. Then there was a heavenly vision: PETA members reminding the hardy motorists who dared to brave Carmageddon that going vegan clears up arteries faster than $5-a-gallon gas.
If we want to get serious about unclogging arteries, maybe road crews should put orange cones in front of slaughterhouses and factory farms.
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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