Animals don't always take abuse lying down. These resourceful animals fought back and made their own animal rights demonstrations:

• A New Jersey man learned the hard way never to trust an exotic animal dealer, no matter what he tells you.
• A grieving mother elephant turned the tables on villagers after they killed her calf.
• A fox clamped her own steel-jaw trap on a hunter's arm.
• A rooster took the law into his own, er, talons at an illegal cockfight. 
• A bull made a rodeo drive straight into the audience. 

eschipul/cc by 2.0

Written by Michelle Sherrow

If you think cruel steel-jaw traps used to snare animals are a thing of the past, think again. Animal protection group Born Free USA just released the results of its undercover investigation of professional and recreational wildlife trapping in the U.S. The horrific video footage shows how animals trapped for their fur suffer, sometimes for days, before dying.

A bobcat is caught in a leghold trap in New Mexico. © Born Free USA / Respect for Animals

 

The trapper kills the red fox by crushing the fox’s chest and lungs with his foot in Pennsylvania in January 2011. The fox is restrained by a catch pole. © Born Free USA / Respect for Animals

  

Collateral damage: A non-targeted skunk’s front leg is caught in a leghold trap in New Mexico. © Born Free USA / Respect for Animals

The widely used steel-jaw traps crush animals' limbs and are so painful that animals sometimes mutilate their own bodies in an attempt to free themselves. Another trap, the Conibear, crushes animals' necks and chests, taking three to eight minutes to suffocate them. Animals caught in traps that are set underwater take up to nine agonizing minutes to drown. And the target animals aren't the only ones who get caught in these traps. Born Free USA estimates that one in three victims are other animals, including many homeless or lost dogs and cats.

Born Free's executive vice president, Adam Roberts, says, "Commercial fur trapping dates back to the 1600s and has hardly changed. It remains barbaric and most people are not even aware that this is going on in most of the U.S." Even though more than 80 countries and some U.S. states have banned steel-jaw traps, they are still legal in most of the country. What are we waiting for?

The only way not to support the fur-trapping industry is to refuse to buy any item containing fur. Please sign PETA's Pledge to Be Fur-Free today. And if you've ever even considered wearing animal fur, this video is for you.

Written by Michelle Sherrow

bp3 / CC

In an act of epic failure and cruelty, a Mendocino County, California, woman tried to handle the mouse problem in her trailer with a .44-caliber Magnum. The result: two injured people and several snickering mice.

Beyond her heavy-caliber lack of compassion for not realizing that mice can be controlled humanely (like, without the use of firearms in a small enclosed space), this woman gets extra points for managing to shoot two people by accident. Her domestic hunting expedition was cut short when she dropped the Magnum, causing it to fire. The bullet struck her in the kneecap (pwnd!) and went on to graze a nearby man's groin (dbl pwnd!) before ending up in his pocket. Hard to know what to say, really!

I love Fox news, my preferred news source for all things weird, for closing the story by reassuring everyone that "[t]he mice escaped the shooting unharmed."

If you run into this woman on the street, let her know we’ll be happy to send her a humane mousetrap to help her make a better decision next time, just in case her self-inflicted knee-capping wasn’t enough.

Posted by Sean Conner