This was sent in by Marc Bekoff for Taylor Courtney Hobbs, anundergraduate at the University of Colorado, Boulder. As you will haveguessed from the title of this post, it's kind of depressing. Before Istarted thinking really seriously about animal rights issues, itliterally never even occurred to me that there might be something wrongwith keeping wild animals confined in completely unnatural surroundingsfor people to gape and shout at all day, but once you start looking atit that way, a trip to the zoo feels more like a horrorshow than a funfamily outing. More on the topic here.

Just so I can complete the perfect trifecta of posts about quirky demonstrations today (see the shower girls and the DC dinosaur in case you missed them), here’s one that involves six businesspeople in one small cage. The purpose of this protest—which took place outside drugmaker Eli Lilly’s annual shareholder meeting yesterday—was to let the company’s shareholders know about its decision to outsource animal experiments to China and other countries where animal protection laws are virtually non-existent.

As a wise man once said, “A man’s crimes against nature aren’t any less disgusting when he pays the Chinese to do them for him.” OK, fine, a wise man didn’t once say that. But he should have. ’Cuz it’s true.

Earlier today, I brought you an image of a giant dinosaur attacking DC to help end animal testing. I’m no mind-reader, but I’m fairly confident that the following, word for word, is exactly what went on inside your heads when you saw that picture:

Well, you were wrong, people. You were wrong. Because, difficult as it may be for you to imagine, there is one thing that's even better than a giant dino rampaging through our Nation’s capital. And we pulled it off yesterday afternoon in Times Square: The first-ever girl/girl shower demonstration. The purpose of the demo was to remind passersby and the media—just in time for Earth Day—that if they’re worried about the environmental devastation caused by wasting water, they should cut it off at the source … by going vegetarian. Just to spell this point out, it takes 5,000 gallons of water to produce just one pound of meat. Which is roughly equivalent to about a full year’s worth of showers (depending on how clean of a person you are).

Now that you’ve patiently sat through the math lesson, here are some pics of two girls and a naked cowboy in a shower. Yup, the naked cowboy himself (who is normally very territorial about his space in Times Square) was gracious enough to hop in with these kickass activists, telling reporters that he was doing it “for the animals — like me.” Glorious.

For reals. The thing is about 25 feet tall, all told, and he’s pretty tough to miss (I did a classic double take when I caught a glimpse of him peering through the window when they were setting up in our parking lot for a dry run last week). This big guy was outside the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services yesterday to remind U.S. government officials that testing on animals is about as progressive as the stone age. Yes, I know that dinos were extinct by the Stone Age, but I would hate to have to explain that to a 25-foot tyrannosaurus. He really does look pretty menacing.

For more info on the campaign that inspired these demonstrations, here’s a recent post about a Paleolithic government entity called ICCVAM, who have been making a royal mess of things for about a decade now.