We’re getting tons of calls from people who are concerned about the Iams recall, and PETA’s been a flurry of Iams-related activity this morning, so I figured I’d fill you in on all the new information. Just on the offchance that you haven't heard this story yet, here's a quick recap: After an unknown number of cats and dogs died of kidney failure from eating tainted pet food, Menu Foods, a contract manufacturer for Proctor & Gamble's Iams and Eukanuba brands, has recalled 60 million cans of pet food from stores nationwide. If you're worried about your own animals, click here for the full information about the recall on Menu Foods' site, or you can call them at 1-866-463-6738 and 1-866-895-2708. Not to cause too much alarm and despondency here, but if you do suspect that your animal has become seriously ill, the best thing to do (as always in such cases) is gently carry them to the car and rush to the nearest veterinarian.

There have been some murmurings about class action suits being filed against the company, and CBS has reported on someone in Chicago who is suing. We've also written a letter to Proctor & Gamble about this issue, which you can read here, and we're calling on prosecutors to investigate whether cruelty charges should be filed against Menu Canada, Menu Foods, and Iams for alleged failure to warn consumers about the tainted food as soon as they had the information and—just as disturbingly—apparently feeding the tainted food to cats and dogs in order to test it.

As our letter to Iams points out, this isn't the first time Proctor & Gamble have been responsible for dog deaths: Our investigation into the company a few years ago caught them cutting out huge chunks of muscle from their test subjects' legs and leaving them to suffer for days. I've posted footage of that investigation below, and you can find a list of pet-food companies that don't test on animals here.

This incident should serve as a wake-up call to Iams that it's time to abandon all laboratory testing on animals. Click here to let Iams know that you won't buy while animals die, and click here to contact Menu Foods to demand answers and an end to all their laboratory tests on animals.

Not sure how many of you will care, but I thought I’d share some cool geeky news that I’m pretty excited about.

Have you noticed how I’ve been hyperlinking the word vegetarian a bit lately? Well, our resident search guru Joel Bartlett has been at me to do it because it helps with "Search Engine Optimization." Or, in English, it helps Goveg.com rank higher in internet search engines.

Well, today, after months of super technical and top secret work behind the scenes, and after not nearly as much or nearly as technical and obviously not top secret work by me hyperlinking the word vegetarian, I’m happy to announce that GoVeg.com is now the highest ranking website on Google when you search for the word “vegetarian.”

As you also may have noticed, next on Internet-nerd Joel Bartlett’s agenda is getting his myspace profile to be the highest ranked page on Google when you search for Joel Bartlett. And he’s got some tough competition from an ABC weatherman by the same name who I will not link to for fear of increasing his search ranking . . .

All joking aside, we’re pretty psyched about this because we believe GoVeg.com is the best resource available for helping people go vegetarian, so we want it to be super easy for people to find the site. It really has taken a lot of work and many months to get there, so we’re pretty thrilled about it.

The massive Iams pet food recall has been all over the news lately, and I've been hearing a lot about it from people who are concerned about their own animals. Anyway, I thought you’d like to see the letter we sent to Iams about it all. You can click here to read it, and I'll let you know if we get any more news. In the meantime, just in case there's any confusion about this: Please don't buy Iams until they get their act together and stop testing on animals.

If you read my posts on the Iditarod in the past couple of weeks, you'll know that this particular issue gets me kind of riled up. Not only do people seem to think that the fact that it's a "tradition" somehow justifies the cruelty inherent in the event, but I've even heard people try to claim that these dogs actually enjoy the experience. I wonder if all the dogs who are killed because they don't make the cut enjoy that experience too. Anyway, here's the most recent, and (mercifully) last little piece of sadism served up by this year's Iditarod participants. As the race was coming to an end, musher Ramy Brooks, who was caught attacking his dogs with a trail marker, and one of whose dogs later died from apparently unrelated causes (call me crazy but my guess is that it was from being forced to run hundreds of miles in the freezing cold) has been disqualified from the race. Yup, ol' Ramy was actually disqualified from an event that is inherently abusive to dogs for being too cruel to the dogs. Sounds like a real winner. You can check out the story here, and if you want to write to some of the race's sponsors and ask them to make this the last year they support this debacle, just click some of the fancy buttons to the right.

I just started reading this hilarious blog called Teddy Wisdom. Heard of it? I’ve been passing it around the office, and my friend Joel has launched a new, albeit fictional, PETA affiliate called PETSA: People for the Ethical Tretment of Stuffed Animals.

In other urgent Internet news:

PETA is an answer to a question in this wedding quiz thingy.

Check out this painting with a question, then go save some seals.

In case you ever run into a Trivial Pursuit question asking which barnyard animal is most similar to the UN, the answer is chickens. Now you know.

Why can’t people get these instead of those hideous betta fish?

It doesn’t exactly have to do with animals, but this is among my all-time favorite pieces of internet folklore. Whatever. Leprechauns need love too.

I’m glad I'm vegetarian because the cows are effing pissed.

That's all I've got right now, but let me leave you to meditate with the the gentle camels of Peaceful Camel Valley . . .

My buddy Pulin, who works on the college campaign for those fast-living trend-junkies over at peta2, was in Panama City last week to try and throw a little bit of social responsibility into the potent mixture of drinking, partying, and boys and girls gone wild that is College Spring Break. You know: Sex, drugs, rock and roll, compassion for animals—all that good stuff. Anyway, a funny thing happened once Pulin and his gang brought out the chicken costume and began passing out leaflets about KFC. A probably well-intentioned but slightly over-eager dude in the crowd (pictured below) decided it would be a good idea to blindside the chicken (actually a University of Florida student named Beth) and tackle her to the ground. Beth was unhurt, but the police officers who witnessed the assault were relatively peeved about the whole thing:

The story has a happy ending though. Pulin and Beth decided that they wouldn't press charges if the tackler, who turned out to be a fairly affable fellow named Dave, would agree to get in the chicken costume himself and spend some time holding a sign to encourage people to stop eating animals. Dave was more than happy to oblige. The story made the front page of the Panama City News Herald, and you can check it out here.

As you probably know, our letter to Al Gore, urging him to go vegetarian to reduce global warming, has been covered by media all over the place. But my favorite piece so far comes from a recent segment on The Glenn Beck Show on Headline News. Whether you’re a fan of Glenn or not, this certainly makes for some riveting television. Enjoy!

Every now and then, my department at PETA gets together outside of work to do a little teambuilding, brainstorm some brilliant new ways to help animals, and swap nasty rumors about people in the other departments. For the most recent social event, we decided to hit up Johnny Rockets to take advantage of the 2 for 1 Streamliner deal I've been talking up. Apart from a few tense moments trying to talk my friend Joel down from ordering four veggie burgers just for himself, the whole thing went really smoothly. Mylie told us all about the latest weird hippie stuff she's been getting up to, Tracy (my boss) talked a bit about her husband's sweet-ass band, and the staff at Johnny Rockets loved seeing a table of 10 scarf down a week's supply of veggie burgers like they were nothing.

Anyway, there you have it, Johnny Rockets veggie burgers: Healthy, delicious, and 2 for 1 until the end of the month. I can highly recommend it if your office does department lunches like mine does. Hell, if you work someplace that doesn't spend all its money on helping animals, maybe you can even get them to pay for it.

One of the Iams products recalled after animal deaths

They've been dying in the Iams labs, and now they're dying in people's homes. After an unknown number of cats and dogs died of kidney failure from eating tainted pet food, Menu Foods, which is a contract manufacturer for Proctor & Gamble's Iams and Eukanuba brands, has recalled 60 million cans of pet food from stores nationwide. As a result, Proctor & Gamble has announced a major recall of certain types of its food throughout the country. You can learn more about the story here.

Proctor & Gamble is no stranger to killing dogs: They've been doing it efficiently and professionally for years, and they've developed numerous ways of getting the job done, such as cutting out huge chunks of muscle from their test subjects' legs and leaving them to suffer for days before they die—as our investigation into Iams a couple of years ago discovered. Now, of course, boycotting Iams has taken on a whole new meaning since the company has shown

One of the dogs made to suffer in Iams' tests

Casey Affleck is the man. Love his acting, love his attitude, love his beautiful wife, love everything about the guy. And since the indie flick Lonesome Jim and blockbusters Ocean’s 11 and 12 are a few of my favorite movies ever, I was psyched to hear that he’d shot a new “Veg Testimonial” ad for PETA.

We loved the ad so much we wanted to run it all over the place including Casey’s hometown of Boston, but the networks weren’t having it. First, we tried to show Food Network viewers what happens to animals before they’re fried, filleted, and fricasseed on TV, but advertising execs didn’t have the stomach for it. Then we went for E!, MTV, the TVGuide Channel and all eight broadcast stations in Boston. Ad execs said the scenes of animals in factory farms and slaughterhouses as Affleck explains why he is a vegetarian were “too graphic.” Whatever. It is 2007 after all, so we can get as much mileage out of the ad online as we could on TV anyway.

Check out the full feature, including an interview with Casey on the set, where he says, “When people ask me why I don’t eat meat or any other animal products, I say, ‘Because they’re unhealthy, and they’re the product of a violent and inhumane industry,’” Did I just hear an “amen” from the choir or what? I told you he was awesome.

Anyway, we’ll all be hearing a lot more from my boy in the next few months. He’s already wrapped on Ocean’s Thirteen, as well as his brother Ben Affleck’s directorial debut Gone, Baby, Gone, and personally, I’m most excited to see him in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford with Brad Pitt. He’s got a big year coming up . . .