This is what Olivia looked like when she was found:

The little piglet, who had sustained a fractured pelvis, cuts, and scrapes, was found on the side of the road after apparently falling off a transport truck. The Good Samaritan who found her called PETA for help, and PETA's Emergency Response Team called a wonderful activist to take Olivia to the Animal Rescue League of Iowa (ARL), where she is safe and sound! ARL is working with a doctor to treat the porcine princess, who will never find out what a gestation crate is.

Olivia is well on the road to recovery and even going through physical therapy using an underwater treadmill (you have to watch the video). As one news story about Olivia's stroke of luck put it, "How nice that some people see her as more than sausage and bacon."

Ready to give meat the heave-ho—for Olivia's sake? Order PETA's free vegan/vegetarian starter kit today.

For the first few years of her life, Pippy the Vietnamese potbellied pig was as happy as … well, a pig in mud. She had a home with an older couple and the run of a large yard and was well cared for.

But as her guardians' health began to decline, so did their care for Pippy, and soon she was spending her days confined to a screened porch with no access to the grass that she loved to roll and play in. Her hooves and teeth were overgrown, making it hard for her to walk and eat, and she wasn't getting the companionship that she craved.

A friend of a PETA employee who lived in the area noticed that Pippy never left the porch and seemed despondent. She let PETA know, and when one of our Community Animal Project staffers visited Pippy's guardians, the couple said that they had been looking for a better home for the pig and were happy to have our help.

A wonderful member with a farm in nearby Suffolk, Virginia, gladly took in sweet Pippy, who fit right in with the farm's other rescued pigs, Sherlock and Barb. Pippy loves her new companions and her new home, where she has room to explore, plenty of mud puddles, and all the delicious oranges that she can eat.

Perhaps Pippy and Sherlock's daily adventures will inspire a great novel … or at least inspire some folks to stop eating pigs. 

When a surprised Suffolk, Virginia, resident spotted a piglet trotting down a rural road alone, he caught the tiny pig and took him to an animal shelter. The piglet, later named Sherlock, had been castrated, and his tail had been docked, which indicated that he most likely fell off a truck bound for a farm where he would have been fattened for slaughter. Like his crime-solving British namesake, Sherlock's adventure made headlines.

(c) Kencredible

A PETA employee who read about Sherlock set out to find him a home, and faster than you can say, "221B Baker St.," Sherlock was placed at a small farm sanctuary with other rescued pigs, chickens, and turkeys.

This precocious pig, once destined to wind up as a centerpiece, now spends his days cracking such cases as "Who is available to pet me right now?" and "Where is the sunniest spot to stretch out?"

And as for deducing that pigs are meant to be friends, not food? Elementary, my dear Watson.

One of the perks of working in PETA's offices is that we get to share our work space with the dogs who go to work with their guardians. As enjoyable as it is for us, though, the dogs are the ones who benefit the most because they aren't left home alone all day. Here are the stories of three of the dogs who help make working at PETA a little bit more fun.

Chance was adopted from a local animal shelter four years ago and now has a full-time job overseeing PETA's office in Oakland, California. He loves getting to see his canine best friend, Monster, and greets everyone with a hearty "Arooorooroo!" His favorite part of the job is helping with outreach events, at which he attracts people to the PETA booth by looking irresistible in his PETA doggie T-shirt.

A PETA Community Animal Project staffer found Sophie chained to a car with no food or water when she was about 6 months old. She was living in a mound of trash, and her rescuer at first mistook her for an old tire until she saw the dog's frightened little eyes. Now 10 years old, Sophie accompanies PETA Senior Vice President Lisa Lange to PETA's Los Angeles office, which has helped bring Sophie out of her shell and provided her with things to think about and watch and the opportunity to learn that not all humans are cruel.

When Maguire was a puppy, his family moved and left him at an animal shelter. He was shy and depressed and, since he'd been largely confined to a basement, was not very comfortable with the outside world. A PETA Foundation staffer who volunteered at the shelter adopted Maguire, and when she took him home at 10 months old, he didn't even know how to play with toys. Now 12 years old, Maguire has been part of PETA's Norfolk office crew for years.

If you can't take your pup to work, be sure to go home at lunchtime or hire a dog walker or neighbor to let your dog out. No one wants to stare at the walls for eight hours or more, let alone "hold it" for an entire workday. One way to minimize the loneliness of these pack animals is to have more than one dog so that they can keep each other company.

Beautiful Rusty had a home and a family—until the day that they moved and left him alone in the backyard, with no food or water in the middle of a southwestern U.S. summer. A kind neighbor spotted the abandoned rooster through the fence and called PETA for help. We alerted animal control and asked officers to rescue Rusty, but they told us that oh, no, first they would have to call his runaway owners and "give them a chance to claim him." The owners told animal control that they would return for Rusty, but he languished for days, all alone, surviving only because a caring neighbor managed to get into the yard to give him food and water—offerings that the starved bird gladly accepted.

Finally, after it was clear that Rusty's absentee owners were gone for good, animal control confiscated him and found him a spot at an animal shelter, where he now awaits a new home with a family that won't treat him like a rusty old bicycle—or eat him. In the meantime, the other animals at the shelter get a pleasant wake-up call every morning, courtesy of Rusty's joyful crooning.

Written by Michelle Sherrow