PETA asked for your help in picking the naughtiest person of 2010, and boy, did you guys come through—to the tune of more than 2.7 million lumps of coal! And the “winner” is … Ronald McDonald. The cruel clown got a run for his (blood) money from the CEO of SeaWorld, but in the end, … Read more »
The U.S. banned “finning“—a practice in which fishers cut the fins off sharks and dump the still-living animals overboard to die a slow, agonizing death—back in 2000, but the ban only extended to the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. Now, a decade later, the Senate has finally voted to extend the ban to … Read more »
Why I don’t eat chicken—let me count the reasons: There’s cruelty and callousness, blood and pus, pain and suffering, and sickness and death, not to mention feces, vomit, parasites, pollution, plaque build-up, and other disturbing and disgusting things that I just can’t stomach. PETA has created a compelling 30-second clip called “Why I Don’t Eat … Read more »
I’m such a map geek that I study the road atlas for fun. But I was equal parts intrigued and disturbed by the latest map that I laid eyes on: Food & Water Watch’s Factory Farm Map. This interactive online map shows which areas of the U.S. have the most animal factories, and it also … Read more »
GollyGforce/CC by 2.0 It’s been more than 20 years since I read about the “downed cow” in a PETA newsletter and became a vegetarian on the spot. Now, out of Texas comes another veggie-maker of a story. A whistleblower at the JBS Swift slaughterhouse in Cactus, Texas, told PETA that he went to investigate after … Read more »
We all know that Thanksgiving is murder on turkeys, but it turns out it can be murder on turkey-eaters too.
This just in from an alert PETA member: Gerber is selling baby food made out of veal. For some reason, this struck us at the PETA Files as especially spit-up-inducing. Feeding babies to babies just seems sort of … I don’t know, cannibalistic? Want some puréed fava beans with that, Junior? Would you feed … Read more »
One surprising item in the news today (h/t Treehugger) is a story about activists with the Israeli group Animals Now. For the last few years, Animals Now has been campaigning against the use of cruel battery cages on egg factory farms. Now, the group has put a hidden webcam inside a battery cage on an … Read more »
OK, we don’t have the powers of The Shadow to let us know what evil lurks in the heart of Ronald McDonald, but some recent stories shed some light on who McDonald’s might be hatin’. 1. Its Employees The manager of a McDonald’s in Brazil had to take the company to court to win compensation … Read more »
It wasn’t your average Chicken Dance: A pink stretch Mini Cooper delivered a troupe of little people dressed as dancing chickens to a PETA protest outside a McDonald’s in New York’s Times Square yesterday afternoon. “I Am Not a Nugget!” declared each of the little “chickens” with signs and dance. The “chickens” paraded in front of the … Read more »
benimoto/CC by 2.0 Yes, we wish everyone would just go vegan and be done with it, but we ain’t there yet. It’s a process (and you know that it’s gathering steam if you heard Bill Clinton describing his own dietary decisions on CNN: “No chicken!”). So while we sling vegan starter kits at people as … Read more »
Muhammad Mahdi Karim/CC by 3.0 It seems like only yesterday I was writing about the nationwide salmonella outbreak and massive egg recall. But now it’s time to move on to the latest food safety scare: The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) just shut down a Tyson Foods meat-processing plant in Buffalo, N.Y., after food safety … Read more »
When I was a kid, my parents would tuck me in at night, saying, “Don’t let the bedbugs bite.” But what had been a cute little saying has become a real nightmare for people facing a surge in bedbug populations. And like so many other problems, this one has a link to factory farming, as … Read more »
elbragon/CC by 2.0 Being shipped over great distances to slaughter with no food or water is agonizing enough, but a reckless driver recently overturned a transport truck carrying 235 pigs, killing 74 of them outright and leaving seven others so severely mangled that police and workers killed them on-site to put them out of … Read more »
If anyone still believes that “organic” eggs are a humane choice, please look at these gut-wrenching photos from the Organic Valley farm in Wisconsin: They show birds in stinking, stifling, windowless warehouses, crammed so tightly together that they’re barely able to move—much less spread their wings, scratch in the dirt, or interact normally in any … Read more »
