Following another outbreak of bird flu in Suffolk, 22,000 turkeys in four different sites were killed last week as a precaution to try and prevent the spread of the disease. The spread of bird flu, which is proving to be a very serious threat to the poultry industry and to humans who eat birds, is the direct result of the stressful, filthy, cramped conditions that chickens and turkeys are raised in on factory farms, and when it causes a major scare as it is currently in the UK, the corporations that run these farms act like it’s the biggest surprise in the world.

Setting that aside for a moment, here’s PETA’s handy, pocket-sized guide to preventing bird flu. Be sure to share it with your friends and family!

1. Go vegetarian.

And here are some pics from PETA UK’s demonstration in Ipswich yesterday. Good stuff.

Since Denny’s refuses to listen to us about their continued promotions of the Ringling Bros. Circus, we figured we’d take our message straight to their headquarters. Check out the pics from Wednesday’s demonstration outside Denny’s HQ in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Thanks to everyone who came out to the protest—and especially to my friend Jenna, who played the part of the baby elephant’s backside to perfection.

Nice work, everybody.

umusic/Creative Commons

Which, well, everybody likes a good horror flick, but I prefer to keep my encounters with the macabre entirely fictional, thank you very much. Speaking of segues: Here, ladies and gentlemen, is horror movie legend Robert Zombie with PETA’s Holiday Message:

Mr. Zombie was also kind enough to sign his PETA T-shirt for us to give away on this here blog. So if you’re a Rob Zombie superfan, e-mail me by November 23 to let me know what you like best about the man and his work, and I’ll pick someone to send it to. I'll let you know if you're the lucky winner the week after the Thanksgiving holiday.

You can also click here to read the terms and conditions of this contest, if you like. But don’t expect it to be a particularly exciting experience.

Robert Dziekanski was killed by a Taser stun gun in a Canadian airport last month. Dziekanski’s death, which has been widely reported after a video of the incident was posted on YouTube last night, is one in a long list of fatalities that have been caused by Taser stun guns. And yet Taser International continues to claim that these weapons are safe, practical tools for law-enforcement. How are they able to do this and get away with it?

The strategy’s pretty simple, actually. For years, Taser International has been funding and performing crude experiments on pigs, horses, and other animals that serve no other purpose than to provide them with “evidence” that their weapons are safe for humans. And yet as Robert Dziekanski’s death shows, the information that Taser International has been able to gather from shocking pigs is utterly useless—except insofar as it serves to protect Taser CEO Rick Smith from mounting public opposition to the use of his dangerous weapons.

The Taser situation is a perfect example of a problem that is endemic to all such animal experimentation. As is the case with so many drugs that go to market after animal testing only to be pulled from the shelves when they’re shown to be dangerous to humans, the results of these experiments have no relevance whatever to how humans will be affected, because (as should be obvious to a first-grader) pigs and horses have fundamentally different physiologies to humans. We just don’t work the same way. And the inevitable result—as we’ve seen time and again—is that companies like Taser International manipulate the data from their meaningless experiments to justify whatever argument they care to make. And people like Robert Dziekanski pay the price.

This video shows one of the hideously cruel experiments that Taser International has been performing on bulls, pigs, and other animals since they first tried to rush their weapon to market. Do we really want to stake our safety on the word of a man who does this?

Update: The event was a huge success! Pam dished out plate after plate of the faux turkey, which was a big hit with the guests at the homeless shelter. Check out these exclusive pics:

Pamela Anderson will be spending some time at a homeless shelter in Las Vegas this evening to serve an early Thanksgiving dinner to homeless families in the area. And Pam’s act of charity will also be setting an example for people who want to make Turkey Day a bit kinder on the turkeys, as the dinner she’s serving is 100 percent vegetarian, with Garden Protein’s amazing faux turkey as its centerpiece. All of the veggie turkey (which you can get in any Whole Foods, btw) was donated by the folks at Garden Protein. Here’s what Pam had to say about the event,

Pam was inspired to host the event after she saw video footage from PETA's recent investigation at a turkey slaughterhouse, which showed workers striking and handling birds so roughly that the animals suffered broken bones. Not to be too much of a downer here since this is a really positive story, but the footage is heartbreaking, and it shows standard practices in turkey slaughterhouses around the country, which should make anyone think twice about eating turkeys this Thanksgiving.

The good news is that there are some wonderful alternatives, and if you’re trying to come up with a menu for your Thanksgiving dinner this year, you could do a whole lot worse than the feast that Pam is serving tonight, including Veggie Stuffed Turkey Roast with wild rice and cranberries donated by Garden Protein, mashed potatoes with veggie gravy, and garlic-braised collards.

I’ll have pictures of the event up later tonight, so be sure to check back!

And if you’re still undecided about whether to have an all-vegetarian Thanksgiving this year, this is the footage from our recent investigation which inspired Pam to host the event.

It’s always great news when a major retailer emerges from the dark ages and realizes that it’s not in its best interests to support the barbaric fur industry. And the bottom line here is that after extensive negotiations between PETA and bebe, the company has agreed to stop buying fur to sell in its stores—which means that no more animals will suffer for bebe’s clothing lines. So, hooray for that.

The bad news is that the company has refused to pull the fur from its racks until after the Holiday season, which means they get one more round of profits from promoting an industry that electrocutes animals and skins them alive. Which is why we’re asking consumers to refuse to shop at bebe this season in favor of compassionate retailers that either never sold fur or have already pulled it from their shelves (like, for instance, Ann Taylor, Charlotte Russe, Donna Karen, Express, Gap, H&M, J. Crew, Jones Apparel, Polo Ralph Lauren, Talbots, Tommy Hilfiger, Urban Outfitters, Wet Seal, or Zara).

So there you have it—it’s a bit lousy of bebe to continue to profit from fur sales over the next three months, but their decision to stop buying the stuff does make a big difference to the animals used by the fur industry, which now has one less major company to fuel their profits. A huge thank you to everyone who helped us out by contacting bebe about this issue during our negotiations!

…Speaking of which—if you haven’t contacted the folks at Burberry yet about their refusal to even acknowledge the horrors they’re funding by selling fur, please take a few moments to let Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts know what you think.

As the air date for I Am An Animal, the HBO documentary about PETA, approaches, there is one important question in the minds of PETA staff members such as myself: “Am I in it?” Well, that’s what I’m wondering, anyway. From everything I’ve heard about this film, it’s an extremely compelling look at animal rights issues, PETA’s role in the movement, and more specifically, what makes PETA President Ingrid Newkirk tick. Evidently, it’s also very even-handed—it gives equal time to PETA’s detractors, and it explores opposing viewpoints and the various controversies that exist within the movement from an impartial perspective. Which is all well and good, but as we know, the real question here is, are there any scenes that have me in them? Like, even a shot where I’m standing around in the background will be fine.

Unfortunately, most of the world will have to wait for the answer to this burning question until Monday at 8 p.m. If you don’t have HBO, see if you can get yourself invited over to a friend’s house to watch it—it really does look like it’s going to be a winner. In the meantime, you can enter to win a copy of the DVD here, and by way of a teaser, here’s what Ingrid had to say about the documentary:

I posted yesterday about two “scientists” at the Oregon National Primate Research Center who have squandered tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on hideously cruel experiments that achieve nothing more than reaffirming painfully obvious truths such as that children suffer when they are deprived of maternal affection.

What I didn’t mention is that PETA has had an investigator inside these notorious labs this year, who spent four months documenting egregious abuses of the animals who are used for ONPRC’s experiments. Among other standard abuses, the animals at ONPRC were forced to eat food from their waste trays; they were terrorized when they were chased and caught in group cages; and they suffered such severe psychological trauma that at least one monkey, Megatron, resorted to self-mutilation. As PETA President Ingrid Newkirk puts it:

As I said yesterday, we’re working on getting these people shut down. You can watch our investigator’s video below, and then please click here to ask the USDA to launch a full investigation into this hellhole.

Update: I just heard from my friend Harald at PETA Germany that the kind soul who rescued the lobsters is a PETA Germany activist! So, if you’re reading this, anonymous German lobster-liberating activist: Danke! From der bottom of mein heart.

It’s been a good month for lobsters. Well, insofar as it’s possible to have a good month when your people are routinely boiled alive and made into bisque. Let’s call it a “slightly better” month than usual. First, a study published in New Scientist proved what we all know already: that lobsters feel pain (scientists are sometimes a bit slower to catch on than the rest of us—they are a methodical people). And now, there’s news from Stuttgart, Germany, that dozens of lobsters escaped from an Asian supermarket out into the street, where they were rescued and sent to an animal sanctuary. Here’s how our good friends at Der Spiegel described the incident:

Congratulations, lobsters! We’re all pulling for you. We’re all pulling for you. And for more on this story, Stephen Colbert, ladies and gentlemen:

I’ve been taking a break from the Vivisector of the Week posts for the past month, but when my colleague Justin told me about these two nasty little specimens, I knew I needed to highlight their work—because, well, it really is something to behold:

Eliot Spindel and Judy Cameron both work at a place called the Oregon National Primate Research Center, and they specialize in traumatizing and hurting monkeys.

Eliot Spindel OHSU/Creative Commons Eliot Spindel has squandered more than $3.5 million of taxpayer money since 2000 in an attempt to show that (wait for it) smoking during pregnancy can be bad for the child. It seems like Mr. Spindel could have saved himself some trouble by just asking someone, but he wanted to do it the hard way, by impregnating monkeys, injecting them with dangerous levels of nicotine, delivering the babies pre-term via caesarian section, then killing and mutilating them shortly after they’re born.

Judy Cameron DevelopingChild/Creative Commons I don’t know whether there’s something in the water over at ONPRC, but Spindel’s colleague Judy Cameron seems to share his fascination with performing expensive and painful experiments in the service of a mind-bogglingly self-evident piece of information. Cameron’s work involves separating baby monkeys from their mothers to see how much it traumatizes them—which, as we already know, is an awful lot. Now, thanks to the long hours that Judy and her predecessors have spent in the lab torturing primates, we know that babies suffer when they’re ripped from their mothers and deprived of affection. Thank you, Judy.

Wonderful work those guys are all doing over at ONPRC, huh? We’re going to see what we can do to make sure their whole operation is shut down for good.