Here's the thing. We're a little ways away from getting shoe companies to ditch the leather entirely—though we've made some significant headway by encouraging retailers like The Gap to boycott the Indian leather industry, which really goes out of its way to be unpleasant to animals. That said, there's something particularly hideous about Nike's decision to celebrate the 25th Anniversary of their Air Force Ones by making a special edition shoe out of crocodiles. Come on, guys—couldn't you have just cranked up the Nelly and thrown a kegger or something? Nike seriously needs to fire whoever it was in their marketing department who thought that brutally killing reptiles would be a cool way to celebrate their silver anniversary.

Anyway, the good news is that people are outraged about the promotion, and Nike's been taking a lot of flak about it in the media, which has helped to raise awareness about the suffering of crocodiles used for clothing, who are often caught in the wild with huge hooks and reeled in when they become weakened from blood loss. It also gives me an excuse to post this amazing PSA featuring Gena Lee Nolin. Enjoy.

Well, hot damn. For a month now, our crack team of cuteness consultants in PETA's Fabulousness Department have been poring over this year's sizzling-hot batch of entries for our Sexiest Vegetarian competition, and they've finally emerged, exhausted from all the attractiveness, with an eye-popping line-up of spectacular, jaw-droppingly gorgeous finalists for you to feast your eager eyes on. OK, even if I hadn't run out of synonyms for "sexy" a while back, there's just no way I can sustain this kind of rhetoric for an entire entry, but hopefully you get the point. The finalists have been announced, and you can vote for the sexiest here. This year's winners get a trip to Hawaii.

Click the ridiculously sexy vegetarian below to check out this year's top twenty. And don't forget to vote.

OK, I know I’ve written about our fashion police before (those saucy minxes who pass out citations to passersby who are wearing fur, leather, or wool), but these pics—from a recent Vancouver demonstration—are too good to pass up. I’ve never seen people look quite so happy to get arrested.

My buddy Ryan, who is currently on tour with Taste of Chaos for those hard-partying scene-hounds at peta2, was busy getting himself a suntan in Florida on Friday between stops on the tour (seriously, I need Ryan's job), when who should be frolicking on the beach but representatives of KFC's parent company, Yum Brands. Turns out Ryan and his pals had stumbled upon a Yum corporate teambuilding retreat. I wouldn’t think that finding out about how your company is responsible for outrageous, large-scale animal abuse is all that great for morale-building, but Ryan, spunky little hipster that he is, was determined to find out. Here are the pics he sent in:

Bo, one of the spear-wielding chimps on a Senegal reservation

No, I'm not talking about an NRA convention—I'm referring to this fascinating article that was in The Washington Post the other day about these chimpanzees who have been discovered in the West African savannah fashioning spears that they use to hunt bush babies. It's been sitting in my Inbox for a few days now, because it took me a while to work out exactly how I felt about it. On the one hand, this is yet more incontrovertible proof that animals are intelligent, that they are capable of making plans and carrying them out, and that (this is the important point here) it is therefore imperative that we apply to them the same ethical considerations that we naturally apply to people based on humans' demonstrated ability to consciously experience things and, consequently, to suffer. Which means, like, not eating or wearing them, or—since we're talking about monkeys here—not stuffing them in tubes and pumping them full of drugs until they die.

Of course, the part of the story that makes me a little uncomfortable is the fact that this particular demonstration of self-awareness is a violent one, and one that itself causes suffering. But, despite the added twist of the spears, my response to this is the same as my response to anyone who says, "Why would you care about killing animals yourself when they kill each other in the wild?" (You'd be surprised how often that comes up). The mixed blessing of having a highly developed sense of ethics like humans have (for the most part) is that you still have to act morally towards individuals with a less highly developed sense of ethics—which means babies, people with low IQ's, and, yes, chimps with spears. It's only really a dog-eat-dog world if you're a dog, which is one of the many reasons I don't eat dogs, for instance … or hunt bush babies.