Written by PETA
Deflocked, baby. Deflocked.
To check out the archives of past strips, click here.
This one’s for our campaign to encourage Chicago to maintain its ban on foie gras. With a different slogan, it could probably also be pressed into service as a reminder to tip your waiters. Either way, I’m a big fan of it. It features the wonderful Brooke Johnson, and a plea to Chicago’s alderman to put a stop to the hideous practice of force-feeding ducks and geese so that rich people can pretend there’s something civilized about chewing on their livers. Check it out:
Which, as you might imagine, was all the invitation we needed to pen her another little missive, this time to congratulate her on her (mostly) compassionate diet and to suggest that if she can just bring herself to leave the sea life off her plate, we’d be glad to nominate her for next year’s World’s Sexiest Vegetarian contest (which, incidentally, her cousin Lauren won in 2003). So there you go — with her family’s noted abilities at getting people to vote for them, she’s all but guaranteed the coveted Sexy Veg title in ’08. If she can just swear off the sushi.
You can read Ingrid’s letter to Jenna here.
*Via Washington Whispers.
Oh, and in completely (like, completely) unrelated news, there was a cat vitamin recall this week. If you feed your cats vitamins, you should check this link to see if it affects you.
Fatty (adj.)1. Consisting of, containing, or resembling fat: fatty tissue. 2. Pathology. Characterized by overproduction or excessive accumulation of fat.Are you really going to eat that fatty, diseased liver, you sick freak?
Alright, now that we’ve got the definitions out of the way, here’s the big news: Phat Farm clothing and Def Jam records founder Russell Simmons just approached the Chicago City Council on PETA’s behalf to urge them to oppose efforts (funded by what may well be the sickest, most unethical industry on the planet) to repeal the city’s ban on fatty duck liver, or foie gras. Here’s what Russell had to say to the Council:
“Cruelty is wrong, regardless of whether the victim is a child, a dog, or a bird. Let's come together to oppose all cruelty and injustice. I am asking that you support keeping this compassionate law in place—a law that Chicago can be truly proud of."
You can check out Russell’s letter below, and for a little taste of what goes on in the foie gras industry that’s currently pressuring Chicago to repeal its ban, check out this story about 15,000 ducks who burned to death this week at a Hudson Valley Foie Gras factory farm. When asked for comment, Hudson Valley owner Izzy Yanay expressed his deep regret about how much money this is going to cost him. Anyone else feel like these people should be out of business ASAP?
Thanks, Russell, for everything that you do.
PETA Europe did a little trick or treating yesterday at a Burberry store in Manchester to encourage the chain to stop with the fur already. Great demo guys.
Show me any animal, and I’ll show you someone who’s found a way to systematically torture and abuse them. For sharks, it’s the finning industry, which kills an estimated 100 million sharks a year, usually by simply hacking off the fins and tossing the animals back into the water to die. And sharks have an additional strike against them in the form of a widespread myth that they’re evil, man-eating monsters, which makes it exceptionally difficult to get anyone to pay attention to their plight. Which is why Sharkwater—a new documentary opening this Friday which debunks the negative myths about these amazing animals and exposes the cruel industry that’s threatening their existence—is such an important film.
Of course, that’s not the only reason I’m psyched about this movie. Anyone who’s watched as many shark-themed TV shows on the Discovery Channel as I have will know that these animals are, to use a technical term, totally effing rad. Here’s a little teaser for the film, and you can check Sharkwater’s site for showtimes.
News flash! New Zealand has just banned the live export of animals from the country. This announcement comes only a few months after New Zealand farmers announced that they were ending the archaic practice of mulesing, which is a procedure where large chunks of flesh are cut from sheep’s hind quarters with no painkillers to prevent flies from laying eggs in their wrinkly skin. Kudos to New Zealand for taking the lead on both of these issues and setting the wool industry animal welfare bar a little bit higher.
Now it’s time for the Australian wool industry to pull its head out of the sand and get with the program. If New Zealand can make these two important changes in its entire wool industry in a matter of months, certainly Australia can follow suit. You can help make that happen by clicking here.
If you’re new to the blog or to this issue, there is a great overview of both mulesing and live export here.
After I posted a recent interview featuring PETA President Ingrid Newkirk, a lot of people have been asking how she ended up with a cast on her arm. When I asked her how it happened, she told me she’d broken it while disciplining her assistant, Starza, but—difficult as Starza can doubtless be sometimes—I suspect that the truth isn’t quite so dramatic. The closest I could get to full disclosure was an article that came across my desk a few days later that’s slated for the next issue of PETA’s quarterly magazine Animal Times. It’s a great little piece, so here it is for anyone who’s curious about how Ingrid ended up with that cast. Warning: this is a classic bait and switch—she’s going to turn the tables on you and make you think about, like, animal suffering—but as I say, it’s a great little piece.
"Just as I was setting out to launch my new book, Let’s Have a Dog Party!, I met a wet floor and went splat, neatly snapping the bones in my wrist. Ooh, the pain! Thank goodness for IV drips. Lying on the emergency room gurney, I thought of a seagull I had seen with a broken wing who was being tormented by boys, of the fox in our fur-farming video with a broken leg, and of the monkey who caught his arm in a laboratory cage and broke it. How had they coped without pain relief of any kind? And not just with the screaming pain of their injury, but with the simultaneous fear of attack by the humans who were clearly out to harm and even kill them? Even though they may try to hide it, animals feel pain just as much as humans do.While researching our Animal Liberation Display, we found that during the days of human slavery, whites claimed that blacks did not experience pain as acutely as whites did. Blacks’ stoicism in the face of total domination, like that of animals today, was taken as positive proof that they were almost immune to physical pain. The same mindset allowed families to be torn apart because Africans were also, most conveniently for their owners, thought not to have the same emotional and familial ties. Some mothers walked a dozen miles every night, after a day of hard field work, to glimpse or hold a child sent to another plantation.Families are still being torn apart. Chimpanzees used in “cute” ads like those for computer supply company CDW, which earned this year’s top Litterbox Award, are just babies, torn away from their mothers and forced to dress up in silly costumes and grimace for the camera (minus their canine teeth, which are always pulled). By the time they are 8 years old, they are too strong to be managed and are “retired” to filthy, depressing roadside zoos or laboratories, never to see their families again. Times change and victims’ identities shift, but old, worn-out, flawed arguments remain. Please join us in vigorously bursting these balloons that drift everywhere around us. Every word spoken, every myth challenged, and every pamphlet posted and video link shared puts a pin in them. Thank you." -Ingrid Newkirk
A little light relief for you all this morning: A man in Tama, Iowa, was out pheasant hunting with his dog this week, when the mischievous little canine stepped on the hunter’s gun, shooting the man in the left leg. True story. The hunter, James Harris, is apparently recovering in an Iowa hospital, and, hopefully, having a long hard think about things like poetic justice, irony, and why it sucks to get shot at by another animal. There’s no word yet on whether the dog is being charged with the shooting.
The Canadian group Global Action Network, in collaboration with Farm Sanctuary, just released an undercover investigation of Canada’s largest foie gras farm, Elevages Perigord. It contains some of the most horrible cruelty I have ever witnessed, and it is almost impossible to get through it without ruining your day. Which is why it should be mandatory viewing for anyone who’s ignorant enough to eat this stuff. There’s some more information on foie gras and the steps PETA is taking to get it banned here.
If you want to see firsthand what happens on foie gras farms—or if you’re a foie gras lover who urgently needs some education about the horrors that you’re supporting—I’ve posted the video below.
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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