If you visited PETA's Web site during the month of November, you probably saw turkey slaughter footage. And no, I don't mean Sarah Palin's infamous turkey pardon fail.

But have you ever seen slaughter footage from Turkey? Turns out animals are killed as cruelly there as anywhere else.

This video was taken in a slaughterhouse in Turkey, but pointlessly cruel abuse like this can happen to any animal anywhere—from the 8-day-old calf who was beaten and kicked while on her way to slaughter in the U.K., to the conscious chicken plunged into scalding-hot water in an Indian slaughterhouse, to any of the animals enduring the many horrific abuses we've documented in the U.S. at Pilgrim's Pride, Smithfield Foods, Butterball, and AgriProcessors facilities, among others.

If this video upsets you, please run, don't walk, over to GoVeg.com and order a copy of our free "Vegetarian Starter Kit." For those of you who are already vegetarians, keep this video handy and show it to the next person who asks you why you refuse to eat anybody who had a mother.

Written by Jeff Mackey

flickr / CC

Long before I kicked animal flesh out of my diet, I celebrated my birthdays by eating lobster.

As in, let me celebrate my birth by paying a cook to throw a fully conscious, feeling being into a pot of boiling water to scald to death for my dinner. Ugh.

No wonder my heart skips a beat whenever I read about a caring person who liberates a lobster from a filthy lobster tank so that the animal can be returned to the sea. So my heart nearly burst out of my rib cage when I read that a Slovenian tourist and his daughter bought 30 lobsters for 1,300 euros (more than US$1,860) from a Croatian hotel-restaurant called Hotel Niko in order to free them.

Thirty lobsters have been spared excruciatingly painful deaths and have been returned to the ocean.

Tonight, I'll be celebrating their release with some "Mock Lobster."

Written by Karin Bennett