Written by PETA
We were flooded with phone calls and e-mails from ticked-off folks after Land and Sea, a TV show on Canada's CBC network, aired an episode about the annual Canadian seal massacre. But it wasn't for the reasons that you might think. People were outraged because the episode featured the manager of a Newfoundland gift shop recalling that Kevin Spacey bought a pair of slippers made of sealskin while filming a movie in the area.
Kevin Spacey in sealskin?! We've always known Spacey to be a kind person, so we asked him to set the record straight about this rumor. Spacey's rep assured us that the Oscar-winning American Beauty star did not purchase sealskin slippers (or anything else) from that gift shop. So file this one under "false rumor" (or "rumour," for our Canuck compatriots).
If you're fed up with the cruelty of the Canadian seal slaughter—and the lies of its apologists—then please take a minute to add your voice to those calling for an end to the massacre. Then spread the word to persuade other folks to do the same.
Written by Jeff Mackey
The folks at totalbeauty.com have released their roundup of "Eight Cities With the Ugliest Guys." Hagerstown, Maryland, "scored" second place on the list, which cited lackluster libidos, flabulousness, and puny IQs, among other factors.
Axe, schmaxe. PETA's got the cure for homely Hagerstown residents:
Men who go vegan gain instant sex appeal. How so?
To the men of Hagerstown: Take the "Pledge to Be Veg." You'll be saying, "Bye bye, Haggardtown" and "Hello, Handsomeland!" before you know it.
Written by Karin Bennett
On Sunday, the U.K. newspaper The Sunday Times ran a great article about a recent undercover investigation conducted at a Hampshire laboratory that tests Dysport—a wrinkle-erasing drug similar to Botox—on mice. The investigation was conducted by our friends at the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, and among the most disturbing findings of the investigation was the fact that technicians repeatedly broke the backs of mice while attempting to kill them with ball-point pens. Yes, you read that right. Staffers then used the same ball-point pens to fill out their victims' death records.
Laboratory workers were also videotaped botching injections and swearing at rabbits. One staffer calls a struggling rabbit "a little s**t" and "a disgrace."
As with Botox, both in the U.S. and the U.K., each batch of Dysport is tested on animals. More than 41,000 mice were killed in Dysport tests in a six-month period at just this one laboratory.
Horrors like these don't just take place across the pond either. In the U.S. alone, it is estimated that more than 100 million mice and rats are killed in experiments every year. And here in the U.S. these sensitive, intelligent animals are not protected by any federal laws, even though they are the animals who suffer most frequently at the hands of animal experimenters. Investigation after investigation shows that these highly social animals are handled like they are disposable laboratory equipment instead of living animals who deserve respect and kindness.
Written by Alisa Mullins
It's true: Dollar General cares—about its customers' concerns and about animals.
After we received complaints that Dollar General, which has thousands of stores across the U.S., was selling hideously cruel glue traps, we wrote to the bargain retailer. In our letter, we described how animals who get stuck on glue traps can suffer for days before finally dying of starvation or dehydration. Many victims of glue traps rip their skin from their own faces and bodies as they try to escape, and some resort to chewing off their own limbs while trying to free themselves. We also let the company know that there are plenty of humane ways to deal with mice and rats.
Dollar General responded to our letter by announcing that it will stop selling glue traps. Just like that. The company didn't hem and haw—officials simply made a compassionate decision.
Dollar General joins other large retailers, including Albertsons, Walgreens, CVS, Rite Aid, and Safeway, that have stopped selling glue traps after discussions with PETA. Please thank the company for its decision—and then ask home-improvement biggie baddie Lowe's to follow suit.
Last year, PETA filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against Motomco, the glue trap manufacturer that supplies Lowe's with its sticky death traps. Our complaint stated that Motomco was selling misleadingly labeled glue traps designed to make people believe that these traps were somehow acceptable. The label stated that the glue trap contained a naturally occurring anesthetic called eugenol, implying that animals caught in the trap did not suffer or feel pain. In reality, they do suffer and feel extreme pain.
We recently received a letter from the FTC letting us know that our complaint has officially been closed—because Motomco has removed the misleading claim about eugenol from its packaging and promotion materials!
Since Motomco's glue traps are the only brand that Lowe's sells—and Lowe's claims that it only sells glue traps that are "humane" because of eugenol—we hope that the change in Motomco's packaging will be the final push that Lowe's needs to pull glue traps from its shelves. Because it can no longer hide behind Motomco's misrepresentations, we've written to the home improvement company asking it to immediately rid its stores of the cruelest mouse traps on the market today.
Humane alternatives do exist and it's time for Lowe's to join other retailers, including Walgreens, CVS, Rite Aid, Safeway, Dollar Tree, and Albertsons, in banning the sale of glue traps. Click here to find out how you can help.
New clothes and a new crush may get many students excited about school, but the surest way to make someone dread biology class is to mention that cruel old standby, dissection.
Since Steve-O knows that only a "jackass" would force a kid to cut up an animal and call it "science," the Wildboyz star was on hand outside Fairfax High School in Los Angeles this afternoon to kick off Cut Out Dissection Month.
His new ad aims to empower kids to fight for their rights not to dissect on animals and to pressure educators to provide alternatives to dissection.
Every year, nearly 6 million animals, including frogs, rats, pigs, and cats, are cut open in cruel, outdated dissection exercises that teach students to dismiss concerns about animal suffering. It's no secret that many violent offenders, including serial killers get their start abusing animals.
Kinder, more effective alternatives to dissection exist and offer students the opportunity to focus on learning instead of cringing through animal cut-ups. In fact, I'm willing to bet that if all schools implemented only humane biology lessons, students would forever remember that this duodenum, not this one, is found in their small intestine.
P.S. More pics of Steve-O's unveiling after the jump.
Many of you have been writing to and calling the University of California–Irvine to demand that it stop using animals in horrible classroom experiments, and your efforts have paid off. The university has just announced that it's ending deadly procedures using rats and replacing them with sophisticated computer simulations.
In the cruel neuroscience experiments conducted at the university, undergrads were drilling holes into rats' skulls, damaging their brains with chemicals, and forcing them to perform in behavioral experiments to assess the brain damage they inflicted. Then the rats were killed. Following a complaint filed by PETA that included suggestions for non-animal alternatives, as well as thousands of e-mails, letters, and phone calls from our supporters, UC–Irvine conducted a review of the experiment and decided that modern, effective non-animal methods will now be used instead of animals.
Because of this victory, as many as 200 rats will be saved from suffering each year.
This is great news, but animals are still suffering in other labs, so it's no time to rest on our laurels.
Case in point: At Arizona State University (ASU), baby rats are killed in classroom experiments in which students remove the animals' small intestines and uteruses. In other experiments, frogs' brains are destroyed when pins are stuck through their skulls, and rabbits have holes cut into their chests and are injected with various drugs before being killed.
Please take a moment to contact ASU and urge the school to follow the example of UC–Irvine by putting an end to the use of animals in classroom laboratories once and for all.
For months, we had received calls from tourists, residents, and whistleblowers about six horses in Chicago who were under the "care" of carriage-ride operator JC Cutters. These horses were reportedly forced to endure Chicago's freezing winter weather in a tent without adequate food or water. In February, we let you know that Chicago officials had investigated the horses' living conditions and their quickly diminishing weight and had impounded the horses.
After receiving endless complaints about these cruel operators, working with tireless Chicago activists, and making repeated calls and sending numerous letters to city officials, we're glad to report that two former employees (a manager and horse owner) of JC Cutters were found guilty Wednesday on six misdemeanor counts related to animal neglect and one misdemeanor count for failing to meet the minimum standards for feeding and sheltering the animals in their care.
The story of these six horses has a happy ending, but unfortunately, there are still countless others in the carriage industry who are living in decrepit conditions in cities across the U.S. How about taking a cue from our friend Jon Stewart? While you might not have an Emmy-winning talk show, you can speak up for the tired and weary horses who are forced to pull carriages day in and day out. Let city officials know that horse-drawn carriage operations should be shut down in Chicago, New York City, and in your own hometown. With the widespread availability of humane transportation around the world, horse-drawn carriages are clearly a thing of the past.
Written by Liz Graffeo
Since Michael Jackson's passing on Thursday, there have been hundreds of news stories ranging from how he influenced just about every musician performing today to how he's responsible for the Academy's recent decision to allow 10 nominations for “Best Picture” (no, really!). It got us thinking: What if Michael's music could be used to help animals?
We've written to Michael Jackson's estate asking for the rights to the singer's first solo hit, "Ben," which was written for the 1972 film of the same name. This beautiful song is about the friendship between a lonely boy and a rat named Ben, and we're hoping to use it to raise awareness about the plight of rats and other animals tormented in laboratory experiments.
Mice and rats make up the vast majority of animals used in experiments, but because they are excluded from the federal Animal Welfare Act, they are denied even minimal legal protection. Part of the message of "Ben" is that rats are frequently misunderstood. (For example—did you know that rats and mice are fastidiously clean, intelligent, and highly sociable animals—they even giggle!) In the song, Jackson sings:
Ben, most people would turn you away I don't listen to a word they say They don't see you as I do I wish they would try to.
We hope we'll be able to use this song to inspire people to understand rats a little better and to join our campaign to stop cruel and archaic animal experiments on them.
Written by Amanda Schinke
All this week, Slate has been running a five-part series on animal experiments. The series starts out by telling the story of a dog named Pepper who was stolen in 1965 and who "changed American science." As the author, Daniel Engber, points out, the fall-out from Pepper's story led to the 1966 passage of the Animal Welfare Act—the first federal law protecting animals in laboratories.
In today's installment, Engber describes the time he spent as a grad student working on a macaque named Clayton in a university laboratory. He describes how he returned to the lab years later to find that, while his life has moved on—and out of the laboratory—Clayton is still imprisoned, his whole world limited to just two rooms:
In all the time I'd been gone, Clayton had lived in the same room, on the same feeding schedule, and with many of the same neighbors. … Every day or two, he's carted off to a room painted all in black, and his head is fixed in place by the post that still protrudes from his skull. He sits there as always, staring at targets on a computer screen. When he moves his eyes the way he's supposed to, he gets a droplet of Tang as a reward.
Engber also talks about PETA's famous Silver Spring monkeys case, which was the impetus behind sweeping changes made to the Animal Welfare Act in 1985, including the creation of oversight committees that we are currently hounding to do their jobs.
While the series of articles focuses on the use of dogs in experiments, it also describes what is done to rats and mice. That's because no discussion of vivisection can rightly avoid the elephant (or, in this case, mouse) in the room—which is the fact that most of the whopping number of animals used in experiments are these small mammals, who, for no reason other than prejudice and convenience, are still specifically excluded from the Animal Welfare Act.
We strongly recommend taking a minute or two to check out the series—and don't miss part IV, which talks about PETA's undercover investigation at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill.
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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