ACTION: Protect Elephants from Ivory Poaching

Posted on 26 May, 2012 by Veganistan

The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) has launched a new petition drive to curb elephant poaching and the illegal ivory trade, which have been increasing across the globe, with an unprecedented number of seizures of illegal ivory worldwide.

According to IFAW’s petition on Care2:

Within about 30 days in early 2012, 300 to 650 elephants were killed by heavily armed poachers in a single national park in Cameroon, out of an estimated national population of 3,000 to 5,000.

IFAW believes that even one elephant killed for its ivory is one too many. We will not stand by idly while elephants are needlessly slaughtered to meet a demand for luxury goods.

Join the fight to free elephants from the threat of ivory poaching.

Please sign this petition to urge the European Union to take immediate action to stop the poaching and to help protect the world’s elephants from the continued threat of ivory trade.

You can sign the petition here.

ACTION: Petition to UVA President: Stop Cruel Trainings Using Live Cats for Practice

Posted on 17 May, 2012 by Veganistan

URGENT ACTION ALERT

The University of Virginia continues to use an archaic, ineffective, and extremely cruel practice that other medical schools have long abandoned: using live cats as practice dummies for intubation trainings in their pediatric residency programs, resulting in great pain and long-term injury to the cats.

According to Dr. Roberta Gray, M.D.:

During their training, residents in their program repeatedly force breathing tubes down the throats of cats, sometimes as many as 19-22 times in one day, This can cause bleeding, bruising, scarring, permanent injury and significant residual pain. At least two cats have had their teeth broken and another had adverse effects lasting days. Cats are used over and over again. People who have had a breathing tube inserted for anesthesia during surgery will often tell you that recovering from the tube was as bad as recovering from the surgery.

This is all the worse because it does not actually help in the proper education of the pediatric residency students, due to the anatomy of cats being quite different from that of humans. Modern methods, such as the use of artificial infant simulators, are clearly superior and cause no harm, so there is no excuse (nor any valid reason) for continuing the archaic and inhumane method of “practicing on cats.”

Please sign Dr. Gray’s urgent petition at Change.org to ask the UVA President to end this cruel program. You can read the petition and sign it here.

New Animal Abuser Registry in New York Goes Live

Posted on 16 May, 2012 by Veganistan

Animal abusers in one county in New York now have more to fear than bad karma.

In 2010, Suffolk County (on the eastern half of Long Island), passed a law to create the first-ever registry of animal abusers, and the bill came into effect this month. Under the new law, those convicted of animal abuse charges in the county will be listed on the registry for five years, with their names, addresses and photographs displayed online, and convicted abusers who fail to furnish the required information will face fines and jail time. The goal is to serve as a deterrent to animal abuse, much as “Megan’s Law” is designed to deter sex offenders from repeat offenses.

The law also requires pet stores, breeders and animal shelters to check the registry before selling animal companions or offering them for adoption, and prohibits them from giving custody of animals to anyone named in the registry, according to the Animal Law Coalition.

The law was prompted by 362 recent animal abuse cases in Suffolk Country, including some rather horrifying incidents that received enough media attention to bring the issue into the public awareness, generating support for the bill.

This is, apparently, the first such database in the USA, despite several prior efforts. Earlier in 2010, lawmakers in California and Tennessee rejected similar bills, and Colorado shot one down in February of this year, but advocates are marching onward. The Animal Legal Defense Fund has organized a national campaign to promote similar legislation across the USA. Nationwide animal abuse registries would make it harder for serial abusers to bypass the restrictions of one county or state merely by moving to another.

According to Care2:

Registries like Suffolk County’s could also prevent crimes that hurt humans. A person who abuses or kills animals is five times more likely to commit violence against humans and four times more likely to commit property crimes, according to a Business Week report on a 1997 study by Northeastern University and the Massachusetts SPCA.

You can see Suffolk County’s new online animal abuser registry here.

Action Alert: Domino’s & “Gestation Crates”

Posted on 13 May, 2012 by Veganistan

Domino’s buys meat from factory farms where pregnant pigs spend their lives trapped in stalls barely bigger than their bodies, called “gestation crates.” They can’t even turn around. Soon after they give birth, they’re re-impregnated. And once their bodies can’t physically endure the constant pregnancies and confinement any longer, they’re killed.

The Humane Society of the United States recently released an undercover video of abuse at factory farm. While other major brands have promised to phase out these cruel practices, Domino’s is continuing to profit from this horrific suffering.

Domino’s can take a very simple step to help eliminate this sort of cruelty. It’s the second largest pizza chain in the world, and eliminating gestation crates will set an incredibly powerful example. Even better, as a huge company buying literally tons of food, if Domino’s changes its practices to stop buying meat from abused animals, others will be forced to follow.

Please sign the petition at Change.org.

Bill Maher on Ingrid Newkirk’s ‘Free the Animals’

Posted on 1 May, 2012 by Veganistan

Bill Maher, host of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” has written a poignant (and, as usual, entertaining) article on the new release of Free the Animals, Ingrid Newkirk’s celebrated book that “tells the riveting, real-life story of the people who put on disguises, use fake IDs, or jimmy their way into laboratories in order to carry out the daring rescues of animals used in experiments and of the insiders, the whistleblowers, who risk their jobs to help them.”

One of those rescues involved Britches, an infant macaque monkey who had his eyes stitched closed and some kind of electrical box put on his head in a really lame and truly bizarre experiment. When PETA released photographs of Britches with his eyelids sewn shut, it was a PR nightmare for his tormentors, who switched to doing more benign things — not as benign as, say, knitting, but at least they stopped using baby monkeys.

Maher discusses the progress that has been made since the book was first published twenty years ago, and the work that is still to be done.

Which brings us to something else that’s changed since the book was first released: the widespread awareness that writing letters to your member of Congress isn’t enough and that bold action is needed to get animals out of laboratories, where dogs and rabbits are treated as though they were pieces of lab equipment. That’s something that the surprisingly normal members of the Animal Liberation Front discovered and is discussed in Free the Animals

You can read the full HuffPost article here, and you can buy the book here.

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Monthly Archives: May 2012