Written by PETA
So PETA President Ingrid Newkirk has sent a letter to Sen. Barack Obama and his family stressing this very point—and urging them to adopt a "pound pup," or Great American Mutt, rather than buy a dog from a breeder or a pet store.
In her letter, Ingrid says, "Senator, no one needs to tell you that this country is proud to be a melting pot and that there is something deeply wrong and elitist about wanting only a purebred dog. Millions of Great American Mutts—the dog that should be our national dog—are set to die in our nation's extremely overcrowded pounds and shelters for lack of good homes. When you are ready, please adopt a homeless pound puppy—a grateful refugee from a society that has not always treated the true "underdog" kindly—rather than cater to special interests who do not have dogs' interests at heart."
Let me break it down for you: Mutts want to live in a good home, eat good food, and live with responsible, loving, patient caretakers just as much as any purebred dog does. It doesn't take a genius to see that if we as Americans were treated the same way that we treat mutts—essentially, ourselves in the dog world—then we'd all be locked up, wasting away in cages, and hoping for someone to take us for "walkies." If we can't be true to mutts, then we can't be true to ourselves.
Posted by Jennifer Cierlitsky
Note: PETA supports animal rights and opposes animal neglect and educates the public on those issues. PETA does not directly or indirectly participate or intervene in any political campaign on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office.
Move over, National Garden Week! Out of the way, Waffle Week (OK, maybe you can stay). And get off my lawn, all you prevention and awareness weeks. This is the coolest week ever … Shark Week! Catch this (geddit?): The Discovery Channel's Shark Week is back for its 21st year, and I am pumped. When else do you get a whole week of programming dedicated to these pointy-toothed wonders?
Shark Week has another purpose, though, besides just being scary (which it totally is). Shark Week's programs teach viewers that shark populations on the coast of the Eastern U.S. declined by 80 percent in the '70s and '80s because of shark fishing for "sport" and steak.
Sharks are hunted not only because of the high price fetched by their teeth, jaws, and fins but also because of their reputation as human-killers.
True, an average of 10 humans die each year because of shark attacks. However, this is nothing compared to the 100 million sharks (and billions of other sea animals) killed by humans every year—so that humans can eat them.
When you think about the painful way that all fish are slaughtered for fun and food—suffocated, crushed to death, and cut open alive—shark attacks really don't seem all that unprovoked, do they?
On that note, check out our new billboard. It's going up in the cities that see the most shark attacks:
For more information on sharks and fishing, please visit FishingHurts.com—and watch Shark Week! I will!
Posted by Amanda Schinke
According to researchers, this shows that fish are more similar to us than many folks would suspect. "[T]he sophisticated neural circuitry that midshipman [fish] use to vocalize develops in a similar region of the central nervous system as the circuitry that allows a human to laugh or a frog to croak …," according to the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where research was conducted.
One researcher at MBL—named, I promise, Dr. Bass—believes that vocal communication is probably widespread among our finned friends. It may even give insight as to how fish have evolved.
Take note that this isn't an isolated bit of research—a great deal of time has been dedicated to investigating methods of animal communication. Each new study verifies more and more what many of us have suspected for years: Humans and other animals aren't all that different.
Posted by Sean Conner
We bet you agree with us that Jenny should be sent ASAP to a fantastic facility where she can choose her own new friends. And the zoo is shipping her out, but where does it want to send her? Their plan is to export her to a drive-through tourist attraction in Mexico called Africam.
Jenny has a lot of psychological and health problems. She needs plenty of space, a nurturing staff to look after her special needs, and her choice of companions. The elephant enclosure at Africam is barely 5 acres—a fraction of the 30 miles per day that elephants might roam in the wild. In fact, this video shows three Asian elephants at Africam as they sway back and forth, an indication of boredom and frustration and a behavior that is never seen in elephants in the wild. These aren't happy elephants—and I wouldn't be happy either if I were standing in a mostly barren enclosure on hard, compressed dirt with nothing to explore.
Of course, there's a far better option for Jenny. The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee has already offered Jenny a peaceful home, where she would have hundreds of acres to explore (and the companionship of three other female African elephants), live in a fabulous facility, and remain protected by the U.S. Animal Welfare Act. Despite this, the Dallas Zoo so far isn't backing down from its decision.
Why? Well, the Dallas Zoo says that it will only send Jenny to a facility accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA). Um, shouldn't it be acceptable to send Jenny to a facility whose standards actually exceed those of the AZA? After all, the AZA's guidelines for elephants permit the kind of abuse seen in circuses. Besides that, the AZA only requires elephant enclosures to be 40 by 45 feet, which—if you do the math—is about the size of a three-car garage. That might not be big enough for a 13,000-lb. elephant.
And by the way, if you're still thinking that AZA accreditation means something, consider this: The elephants at Africam swaying in that video are in an AZA-approved habitat.
If you'd like to help Jenny get to The Elephant Sanctuary and a wonderful retirement, please see our action alert to find out how. Also, be sure to watch 20/20 tonight at 10 p.m., as there will be a moving story about elephants and how they really are just like us. "There are things about elephants that seem so similar to us. Their family life, their emotional life, the fact that they grieve. They stand out from other animals," said Gay Bradshaw, the director of a research institute called The Kerulos Center.
For no particular reason, I'm on my fourth consecutive Ford automobile (a Mustang convertible, natch). It's a 2000 year model, though, and apparently I'm not the only one who hasn't been buying lately: Ford just posted a record quarterly loss of $8.7 billion. Yikes!
Now, our relationship with Ford has had its ups (like when they stopped sponsoring UniverSoul Circus) and downs (such as when the company "won" our 2001 Litterbox Award for an ad boasting about how much leather they could cram into one car). But in the spirit of cooperation (see, we were paying attention during Sesame Street), we've contacted them with this great cost-cutting idea:
July 25, 2008William C. Ford, ChairFord Motor Company Dear Mr. Ford: On behalf of PETA and our more than 2 million members and supporters, may I suggest a way that Ford could dramatically cut costs by reducing employee absenteeism and lowering health care costs? We know that you are a vegetarian. If you encouraged your workers (both current and retired) to switch to a vegetarian diet—as some companies are already doing—and served vegetarian meals in company cafeterias, costs related to absenteeism and health care would drop significantly. According to estimates, the health problems of retired Ford workers alone add about $1,700 to the price of a new car. The American Dietetic Association (ADA) and the Dieticians of Canada conducted perhaps the largest review ever of studies on vegetarian diets. They concluded that vegetarian diets "provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases." They also state, "Vegetarians have been reported to have lower body mass indices than non-vegetarians as well as lower rates of death from ischemic heart disease; vegetarians also show lower blood cholesterol levels; lower blood pressure; and lower rates of hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and prostate and colon cancer." As you know, vegetarians get all the protein, vitamins, and fiber that they need without the artery-clogging cholesterol and saturated fat found in animal flesh. William Castelli, M.D., director of the Framingham Heart Study—the longest-running clinical study in medical history—concluded that "vegetarians have the best diet. They have the lowest rates of coronary disease of any group in the country … they have a fraction of our heart attack rate, and they have only 40 percent of our cancer rate." Vegetarians are truly "Built Ford Tough" and are far less likely to keel over from a heart attack on the assembly line or in the boardroom. To help employees transition to a healthy vegetarian diet, you might want to offer free meals initially, including familiar, comforting taste-alikes such as vegetarian Shepherd's pie and Buffalo wing-style "chicken" nuggets. The short-term cost of these meals will be repaid in spades as workers feel more energetic and become healthier. We'd be happy to provide your cafeteria with a consulting chef, food-preparation tips, product-sourcing information, and recipes, and we'll gladly provide each Ford worker with a free copy of our "Vegetarian Starter Kit."I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you for your consideration. Sincerely, Bruce FriedrichVice President
Posted by Jeff Mackey
In 1996, David signed our "Get Gillette Off the Set" petition, which led to one of PETA's greatest victories against animal testing. Oh, David Duchovny, why don't you love me?
Gillian's also a great friend to animals, having spoken up for bulls in Nevada and elephants in Chicago. In 2005, after Covance tried to stop PETA from showing footage in which the lab was torturing animals, Gillian put the videos up on her own site—and PETA won the suit to screen the footage. Because of Gillian's commitment to helping animals, she won PETA's Humanitarian Award in 2006.
We love David and Gillian, and we're sure that their new movie will be just as wonderful as they are. See you at the theater!
This landmark bill is the first of its kind in the nation to protect sick and injured farmed animals from further torture. Animals on factory farms suffer such injuries so frequently that the industry has a term for them: "downers." Downed animals can suffer immensely as they are either dragged to slaughter or left to die from their ailments—a truly unimaginable hell to suffer through. I think that our downed cow story really had an impact on the passing of this bill. The story is just completely heartbreaking, compelling, and all too common. The good thing is that this story really inspired people to do the right thing and get this bill PASSED.
The frequency of this is staggering. Each year, millions of animals arrive for slaughter either already dead or too sick or injured to walk. This comes from a lifetime of abuse on factory farms, followed by transport to slaughter through all sorts of weather extremes.
"California cannot allow unscrupulous slaughterhouse operators to endanger the safety of America's food supply and engage in grotesquely cruel practices. [This bill] is an important step toward … basic decency to farm animals, and I am delighted that the Governor has signed it into law," said Assemblymember Krekorian, who introduced the bill.
Now if only federal laws were changed to extend this most basic consideration to farmed animals nationwide …
People are still being blown up in Baghdad, and no one knows what the future holds for human beings there. So is it really a safe and responsible place to send these massive, beautiful wild animals?
If you're like me and you're equally angered by this madness, check out what we have to say in our official action alert and let the Fish and Wildlife Service know what YOU think.
Posted by Christine Doré
News flash: Virtually all scriptures encourage kindness and compassion. In any holy teachings—from the Bible to the Book of Mormon—you'll find language that encourages kindness to animals. With this in mind, it should come as no surprise that there are ties between Mormonism and vegetarianism.
Considering that today is Pioneer Day (it's sorta like the Fourth of July, but only for Utah and … not on July 4), Chris Foster—founder of the group Mormons for Animals—is encouraging Mormons to practice kindness to animals in accordance with their faith.
"The Mormon doctrine is strongly pro-animal. And it's strongly opposed to any kind of cruelty to animals, including mistreatment and killing when it is not necessary," Foster told local media outlet KCPW. "Unfortunately, Mormon culture didn't quite live up to that." Might this be because some people still opt to eat animals, despite the endless array of non-animal alternatives that everyone in modern society has access to?
I could restate this all day, but here's the basic idea: be truly kind, not selectively kind.
This all came into question when a team of researchers in Japan (where almost everything but drinking water is prepared with fish) found a volatile chemical from perspiration on clothes worn by older participants in a sleep study. When U.S. researchers did a separate exercise study that didn’t use chronic fish-eaters, they did not come across this same compound. Analyzing both sets of data, researchers found that older study participants' sweat had more "stinky smell"—from metabolizing excess unsaturated fatty acids from the fish—than younger participants' sweat did.
To put it succinctly: Please don't eat fish, lest you grow up to be a smelly old person. (And if you do become such a person, please refrain from working out on the elliptical next to mine—you know who you are!)
So if you can't be motivated out of compassion for the sea animals who suffer immensely as they are hauled up from their aquatic homes to decompress or "drown" in the open air, please give up fish for the sake of the assisted living staff who will have to scrub your body some years from now.
Please, the fish—and the sponge-bathers—are counting on you!
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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