Ron Jeremy has been, um, a really big supporter of PETA's work to help cats and dogs for a long time, and this Friday he took some time out of what I can only imagine was a ridiculously busy night at the Adult Entertainment Awards in Las Vegas to unveil his "Too Much Sex Can Be a Bad Thing" ad, aimed at reducing cat and dog overpopulation by promoting spaying and neutering.

Here are a few pics from the event, followed by Ron's awesome PSA for us. Admittedly, this may not be the first time that Ron Jeremy has posed naked for the cameras, but it's a hell of an ad nonetheless. Oh yeah, and the shirt he's wearing in these pics is priceless ...

It’s too bad that it required an outbreak of a disease that’s contagious to humans for PetSmart to make this decision, but this is something we’ve been asking the pet store chain to do for a long time now. According to The Huntsville Times PetSmart has stopped selling birds in all of its stores for the moment while it looks into the outbreak of psittacosis that has affected the birds it gets from various suppliers. And now that they’ve taken this step of removing these animals from the sales floor, we want to do everything we can to make sure things stay that way. One has to wonder what is happening with all of the sick birds as we speak?

Like all animals exploited by the pet trade, exotic birds sold at pet stores like PetSmart are raised in conditions that are designed to be the most profitable for breeders, which means that they are often crowded inside sheds, barns, and garages without any regard for their basic needs or the dangers of spreading infection and disease. No one should be surprised when this sort of thing happens in a pet store. It should be obvious to anyone who knows anything about birds—the very symbol of freedom—that keeping them confined in cages is cruel in the extreme, and PetSmart should never have been selling these wild animals in the first place. You can click here to learn more about our campaign against PetSmart and contact the company about its lousy track record of animal sales.

There’s a new headstone in one of the plots adjoining Colonel Sanders’ grave in Louisville’s Cave Hill Cemetery. It’s inscribed with what our press release is calling a “moving tribute” to a "Kind Friend of Chickens." I’ll refrain from commenting on the literary merits of the poem itself, but the fact that the bright red letters running down the left side of the poem spell "KFC Tortures Birds" is a piece of undeniable genius on the part of my friend Matt Prescott, who spearheads PETA’s Kentucky Fried Cruelty Campaign, and whose name is on the headstone. In addition to ensuring that when Matt’s time eventually comes, he’ll have a prime piece of real estate waiting for him in Louisville, this has garnered us some great coverage for our KFC Campaign, including a story in US News and World Report today.

Here’s what Matt had to say about the whole thing, and you can see a photo of the tombstone below: