Written by PETA
Check out how PETA Europe and PETA India celebrated Valentine’s Day a few hours ago. I love it. Love the bed, love the signs, love it all. As you can see, they’re a tiny bit more conservative in Mumbai than Dublin, but I gotta be honest, those wings and the heart bow and arrow are pretty hot.
Sky News in Britain did a really cool slideshow of both demos. Check it out here.
Wow, check out this photo of Victoria’s Secret supermodel Fernanda Tavares sporting our “No Fur” button. I got it on Valentine’s Day, no less! Of course, I got it from my friend Michael, who she actually sent it to, but whatever, I've never been one to let details get in the way of destiny ...
And here she is in a slightly different pose, in an ad she shot for us a while back.
Fernanda’s not just a pretty face either. Check out her quote from the interview she did while shooting the ad: "Fashion is supposed to be fun, but there is nothing fun about breaking animals’ necks and killing them with genital electrocution—common fates for animals destined to become fur coats," says Fernanda. "The fur industry butchers animals and pollutes our environment. I could never wear fur."
I love you, Fernanda.
Even if the cruelty of factory farming, the increased heart attack and cancer risk, and the environmental devastation caused by the meat industry don't convince you to go vegetarian, I'm certain that the prospect of being the sexiest smelling person in your office will sway you. According to a recent study published by the NIH,
Results of repeated measures analysis of variance showed that the odor of donors when on the nonmeat diet was judged as significantly more attractive, more pleasant, and less intense.
Hott! Scientists sure do know how to make stuff sound sexy when they want to. Unfortunately for me, my fragrant vegan odor doesn't have much effect on my female colleagues, since (as you might expect) pretty much all of the dudes in my office are rocking a nonmeat diet. But if you're looking for a way to make yourself stand out from the competition with the dreaded Valentine's Day holiday looming, it may be worth a shot. Just so I've got my bases covered—for those of you who are already vegetarian but still smell kind of funky, you can find a whole range of cruelty-free deodorants here.
Remember Rocket Boy from the other day? Well, just when you thought we were all out of impotence ads for this year, we’re rolling out the pièce de resistance.
Nice work, Brad.
Just in case you didn’t catch The O’Reilly Factor last night, Bill was more than fair and did a great job covering our State of the Union Undress.
If you’d like to watch the full clip, it's on the front page of FoxNews.com today.
And back by popular demand, here’s the video that started it all …
It's a culture war, and you're invited! Mr. Culture Warrior himself, Bill O’Reilly, is having PETA VP Lisa Lange on his show tonight to talk about our State of the Union Undress and the use of nudity to draw attention to a serious issue like animal rights.
I think you know what side of the issue Lisa will take, and I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what side good ol' Bill will be taking.
The O’Reilly Factor, Fox News Channel, 8 Eastern, 5 Pacific. And let’s be honest, it definitely beats watching everyone’s favorite germophobe Howie Mandel on Deal or No Deal.
The first time I saw Steven Glover, more commonly known as Steve-O, was in the opening credits of Jackass: The Movie. Steve-O and about eight of his best friends had all climbed into a shopping cart and pushed off from the top of a massive hill to see how long it would take before they smashed into a wall, flying onto the concrete and sustaining various potentially career-ending injuries. I would never have dreamed that it was possible for Steve-O to do something even awesomer than that—until the other week when he sat down with those wild, fun-loving hipsters in PETA's youth division, peta2, to talk about his experience at Ringling's clown college, and his thoughts about the circus's treatment of animals. Yes, I know "awesomer" isn't a word, but if anything merits it, this interview does. Definitely check it out if you haven’t seen it yet.
Julien MacDonald, a fashion designer who is as notorious for his cruel use of fur as he is for a recent run-in with flour-wielding animal lovers (that's Julien on the right, next to Paris Hilton, also in white), recently extended an invitation to our dear friend Pamela Anderson to attend his Fashion Week show in London. In keeping with her character, Pamela—who could have responded in a number of ways—chose the classy route, politely declining the offer and recommending a few useful resources for Julien to educate himself about the fur issue.
As my mother always told me, "When pelting someone with flour fails, some gentle coaxing from a beautiful blonde will often do the trick." OK, my mother never said that. But it seems very apt in this case. Here's Pam's letter:
February 9, 2007Julien Macdonald1 page via fax: +44 207-439-9887Dear Julian,Unfortunately I won't be in London for Fashion Week, but I truly appreciate the invitation to your show and your kind offer of creating an outfit for me. I'm hoping you can extend your kindness to include animals. If you stop using fur, I'd be thrilled to attend a show of yours in the future. Please watch my video about the fur trade on peta.org.uk. You're such a wonderful, talented designer, and I know you can come up with killer fashions that don't kill anything. My friends at PETA and I would love to hear from you should you decide to go fur-free.Best of luck at Fashion Week, and kindest regards,Pamela
So a little while back, we had this brilliant idea for a web feature, which was going to be called "PETA’s Top 10 Reasons to Go to Ringling Circus." The idea was that it would secretly be, like, 10 reasons not to go, except cleverly disguised in a different format. Or something. I don't remember exactly—but I do remember that the meeting where we discussed it was really fun, and people were laughing a lot. Unfortunately, once the hilarity had died down and we actually wrote up the text, it just didn't come out quite right—turns out it may have been one of those "you had to be there" type of things. It seemed like a shame to just let the feature die though, so I bravely volunteered to post it right here on this very blog. Just don't blame me if you don't think it's funny.
Anyway, here it is. Ten PETA points to anyone who posts a comment with a reason that's better than ours. Who knows, maybe it’ll mean salvation for this feature.
P.S. PETA points don’t really exist.
10. Even the dullest show on earth is more exciting than your pitiful life.Get a life! Animal abuse and domination is not entertainment or education. You can enjoy modern circuses that don’t use ho-hum animal acts, such as Cirque Du Soleil. Or come up with some great old-fashioned family entertainment, such as a day trip to a museum or nature preserve or family picnic at a local park. Or God forbid you actually do something active with your kids, like roller skating or a hike!9. Coming from a broken family, you feel right at home among the animals who have been ripped from their families.Baby elephants as young as 1 ½ years of age are torn from their mothers to be broken, trained, and sent out on the road. Four baby elephants born at Ringling’s breeding compound have died since 1998. One fractured both hind legs when he fell from a circus pedestal, another drowned trying to escape a trainer, another got sick and died on the road and one died when she was just a few weeks old.8. You want to show your kids where they’ll end up if they don’t do well in school.Convicts and Criminals and Felons, oh my! From Ringling head elephant trainer Sacha Houcke (who was fined for beating his daughter) to Spanky the Clown (child pornography) to a murderer on parole and an acrobat arrested for sexual battery – Ringling’s had them all. Can you say “The Most Unsavory Show on Earth?”7. You want to teach your kids demeaning of life.Teaching kids about wild animals by taking them to the circus is like teaching them about sex by showing them porno movies. The circus teaches your kids that chaining, caging, whipping and beating animals is acceptable – a bad lesson considering that learning and development experts stress that “Children should see adults treating animals with dignity and respect at all times.” 6. You think $40 on sno-cones is money well-spent.You won’t be alone if you stay home instead of going to the Ringling Circus. Attendance at circuses is down while prices for concessions – sno-cones, soft drinks, programs and kids’ toys are way up. Plan on squandering several hundred dollars for a family of four to visit the circus this year.5. It’s like When Animals Attack meets Russian roulette!At least 12 humans have been killed and more than 100 injured in the U.S. by rampaging elephants. An elephant in a circus traveling in Hawaii killed her trainer and injured another circus worker – it took 87 shots from pistols, rifles, and high powered weapons to stop her. Other elephants have injured and killed trainers and spectators. Are you sure you want to enter your family in the Death-by-Elephant Lottery by going to the circus?4. If you don’t help the circus owner pay his fines and legal fees for animal abuse who will?Ringling management forked over $20,000 to settle charges for the death a baby elephant who was forced to perform while sick; $51,305 in legal fees in a PETA lawsuit; and more fines may be on the way with multiple investigations open by the USDA and a lawsuit for violating the Endangered Species Act.3. You believe that an elephant trainer who beat his daughter would be kind to animals.Ringling head elephant trainer Sacha Houcke pled guilty in May 2005 for beating his own daughter. Lucky for his daughter that Sacha didn’t use the same bullhook on her that he frequently uses on elephants.2. You think that 2000 years in captivity isn’t nearly long enough to understand elephants’ need for vast spaces.Elephants have been exhibited in captivity since before the birth of Christ. Despite Ringling’s claims of education and conservation, there are fewer elephants in the wild today than ever before and those in captivity often die prematurely from health problems caused by a lack of space. While most of Ringling’s elephants were captured in the wild, none of the baby elephants born at its breeding compound can ever be released into the wild because they won’t know how to survive.1. You’re a sucker, plain and simpleP.T. Barnum allegedly said “there is a sucker born every minute.” He might have been talking about people who spend good money to see animals abused at the circus (and pay for those $13 ‘souvenir’ programs).
Did you get this far? Congratulations! Remember, 10 precious PETA points for every reason you can come up with that's better than ours. Don't everybody shout at once.
The bird flu post the other day reminded me of a hilarious old picture from The Onion. Unfortunately, I just didn't get around to writing about it in the blog at the time, but as I like to say about me marrying Natalie Portman and you going vegetarian ... better late than never.
With all the people getting sick, don’t ya think this is exactly what KFC needs—a bird flu vaccine dipping sauce?
Breaking news here folks, and it's been 17 years in the making: In 1989, a video camera caught nightclub entertainer Bobby Berosini beating and punching the orangutans he used in his act at the Stardust. This week, Berosini lost yet another round in the court battle that has been going on ever since.
Instead of just paying PETA's court costs when we won the case the first time round, Berosini was forced by a federal district court to pay more than $250,000 incurred by PETA’s attorneys in trying to locate assets that he and his wife, Joan Berosini, had hidden after the initial legal battle. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld that payment order, on top of the more than $400,000 in court costs Berosini had previously paid PETA. The real victory here, though, is for the animals depicted in the video below, which (just in case it wasn't clear from the whole hiding money and trying to manipulate the justice system deal) shows exactly what sort of a person this Berosini guy is.
$250,000 dollars is a hell of a lot of money to have paid, but after watching that video again, I'm not exactly welling up with sympathy for Mr. Berosini's misfortunes. As PETA's president, Ingrid Newkirk puts it,
“There’s a lesson here for any entertainers who still feel that beating animals is acceptable. Berosini kept intelligent apes locked up in steel boxes for years, and he can never pay back the animals for the nightly beating they endured.”
And in the esteemed words of Forrest Gump . . . that’s all I have to say about that.
Sure, if the signs were a little different and our girls weren’t drop dead gorgeous, it could be mistaken for a Hooters audition, but lucky for us—and the animals—the girls are super hot and instead of “Fried Pickles and Chicken Wangs” their signs read: “Fur Out Love In”.
Our traveling campaigners are on a nationwide anti-fur tour right now, and oddly enough, they are getting crazy amounts of attention at every stop. Here’s an article from Austin. Enjoy.
Oh man . . . sad, weird news. As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, Anna Nicole Smith passed away today. And I’m sure everyone in the world will have an opinion on how and why she died so young.
She worked with PETA on a lot of campaigns over the years, and as strange as it may sound, I always thought she was an absolute perfect fit for us, because just like PETA, you couldn’t ignore her and, love her or hate her, everyone had an opinion. What you see is what you get—I loved that about her.
I always got a kick out of the stories from my friend Michael, who worked with Anna Nicole on all of her PETA projects, and thinking back on it now, she really did a lot for PETA and for animals all over the world.
She spoke out against Iams for its cruel animal tests, spoke up for baby seals in Canada, and gave fur-wearing celebrities an earful, but in my mind her crowning achievement was this amazing anti-fur ad.
After being exposed to animal rights over the years, Anna Nicole even became a vegetarian, and was nominated for the 2006 World’s Sexiest Vegetarian, and looking at her ad you can certainly see why.
It's a tragedy when anyone passes away before their time, but with Anna Nicole, the animals have lost a true sympathiser, and PETA has lost a good friend. We’ll miss you, Anna.
Going vegetarian, that is. A friend of mine from Cleveland sent me this news clip about teenage vegetarians, and it made my morning. Working for PETA, of course I hear stories all the time about the growth of vegetarianism among kids, particularly teenagers, and the folks at peta2 can hardly keep up with their growth—how about zero to 800,000 peta2 e-news subscribers in four years? But it was nice to see the media taking notice of what we’ve known for years . . .
Anyway, enjoy the clip:
Here at PETA, we track trends and statistics on the use of every species used for fur, and sometimes the findings of our research can be a total bummer, like when we uncovered the horrible abuse of dogs and cats for fur in China.
But more and more we are finding that designers and society in general are turning away from the cruelty of fur, and consequently, entire species of animals are being spared. Take, for instance, the great news released yesterday in Dallas, TX, where the findings of a very scientific years-long study revealed the following:
“The fur trade has strangely had no effect on the liger population.”
This is a great day indeed. It always warms our hearts here at PETA when even just one species receives a little bit of justice in the world. ... Yes, even when it happens to be a fictional species popularized by a movie.
And just in case you’ve never seen a liger (or Napoleon Dynamite), here is a very realistic artistic rendering of the rare and elusive species. Meeeeeeeeowwww!
UPDATE: OK, so I’ve received a lot of e-mails. ... Apparently, ligers aren’t fictional at all. Readers have just informed me that, among other things:
Who knew?
Lost season premiere tonight folks! I was a casual fan of the show until a weekend-long season 1 & 2 marathon turned me into a full-on addict. Now, let’s just say that 10pm tonight can’t get here fast enough.
What triggered the aforementioned binge weekend was when Dominic Monaghan shot a pro-wildlife ad for PETA. It's pretty damn wonderful anytime a celebrity takes time out of their schedule to speak up for animals, but Dominic really takes it a step further. Check out this interview about why he did the ad:
And if you need me between 10 and 11 tonight, don’t bother calling. I’ve got a TV date with my girl. The beer and catnip are already on ice.
In some ways, there's just so much to say about Rocket Boy, and yet now that I'm sitting down to write about it, it kind of leaves me a little speechless. Rocket Boy was an ad that we created about 10 years ago (when I was but a Rocket Boy myself) to highlight the connection between eating meat and impotence, and it recently resurfaced in all its glory when some genius in our Campaigns Department dug it up and circulated it around the office today. The Rocket Boy ad comes from the same brilliant minds that brought you "The Three Stages of a Weiner," and "I Threw a Party but the Meat-Eaters Couldn't Come."
Please direct all complaints to WTFRocketBoy@peta.org, with the subject line "Please, please, please stop with the impotence jokes already. Think of the children!" And without further ado ... Rocket Boy, ladies and gentlemen:
A friend of mine who worked on the Marc Bouwer/PETA show on Friday is still in New York for the rest of Fashion Week. Last night, she went to some trés chic afterparty at the Roseland Ballroom where she reported that what stood out even more than the coked-out models were "the frumpy fur-wearers who looked out of place amidst New York’s trendiest fashionistas, who were by and large fur-free."
Apparently these "asshole" stickers have become the must-have accessory of the season for anyone stupid enough to still wear fur. She says they've been showing up on every fur coat she sees ...
Europe's biggest turkey killer, Bernard Matthews, is back in the news. And oddly enough, this time it's not because their workers were filmed kicking birds and using pipes as baseball bats to hit them, but because government veterinarians have confirmed bird flu at a poultry farm in the UK.
So my friends Anita and Lucy at PETA Europe jumped into action and have been doing these “biohazard” demonstrations outside grocery stores in London to let the public know that there is a simple solution to this whole bird flu mess. Here are a couple of pics from yesterday’s demo.
Not to get all doomsday on you, but even our very own US Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt called the likelihood of an influenza pandemic "very high, some say even certain." Yes, bird flu is serious problem and all that, but it just seems like such a simple choice to me: we can either run around in these absurd looking masks all the time like these people
Or we can go vegetarian. Tofu anyone?
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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