Wikimedia Commons

1. Please click HERE to help protect wild horses and burros

2. Please click HERE to speak out about maltreatment at UCSF

3. Please click HERE to urge USDA to pull license of cruel roadside zoo

4. Please click HERE to help stop bullfighting

5. Please click HERE to end elephant tourism in Thailand

6. Please sign HERE to make donkey roping illegal

1. Background | IDA

The Senate recently confirmed Sally Jewell as the next Secretary of the Interior. This could be a positive change from her predecessor, Ken Salazar, who failed to deliver on his promise to reform the federal wild horse and burro program. Salazar, a rancher, defended other ranchers to the detriment of wild horses and burros.

During Salazar’s tenure, the Bureau of Land Management removed more than 35,000 wild horses from public lands. Jewell is known as an outdoor enthusiast and conservationist and IDA is hopeful that her appointment will be good news for wild horses and burros, but she needs to hear how important this issue is to you.

Jewell has already pledged to “pursue effective and ecologically sustainable policies” for management of America’s wild horses and burros. Please take a moment to urge her to keep that promise!

2. Background | IDA

The University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) has a long-standing and shameful record of animal neglect and mistreatment at its animal labs.  Despite the $92,500 they were fined in 2005 by the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture to settle violations of the Animal Welfare Act, more than 100 additional violations of federal animal welfare laws and guidelines have recently been exposed.

These involved the agonizing fate of a female monkey who, apart from her multiple invasive brain surgeries in a Parkinson’s study, suffered further extreme distress due to painful complications from a piece of plastic acrylic left in her head for two years.  Another monkey was subjected to multiple invasive brain surgeries and was deliberately deprived of food so that he would perform tasks while locked in a restraint chair. He lost 25 percent of his body weight. In another horrific incident, experimenters placed live newborn mice inside a freezer meant for dead animals.

UCSF’s animal abuse must not go ignored and they must be held accountable.

3. Background | PETA

Following a lawsuit brought by two local citizens—with the support of PETA and the Animal Legal Defense Fund—Jambbas Ranch, a squalid roadside zoo in North Carolina, has been found to be in violation of state cruelty-to-animals laws. The court found that Jambbas’ treatment of Ben, a bear Jambbas kept confined to a tiny, barren pen made of concrete and chain-link fencing, caused him to suffer in violation of North Carolina law. The court also noted that Jambbas even failed to meet Ben’s most basic veterinary, dietary, and environmental needs.

Fortunately, Ben has been given a chance at a new life at the Performing Animal Welfare Society sanctuary in California, where he is thriving in a vast natural habitat—one that is measured in acres, not feet and inches. He can now splash in his very own pool, rub his back on trees, and sleep soundly in a large straw nest or under oak trees.

But hundreds of animals are still languishing at Jambbas. In fact, inspectors routinely find animals in dire need of veterinary care at Jambbas—and sometimes even dead animals. And despite the cruel conditions that caused Ben to suffer in violation of state law, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) continues to renew Jambbas’ Animal Welfare Act (AWA) license year after year. Enough is enough. The USDA must take action. Now that Jambbas has been found to be in violation of cruelty laws, the USDA has no excuse. The AWA gives the agency clear authority to revoke a license when there are violations of cruelty laws, and it must act on that authority immediately.

Please take a moment now to join PETA in politely urging USDA officials to revoke Jambbas’ license immediately, before even more animals suffer.

4. Background | PETA

Bullfighting is shameful, violent animal abuse dressed up as “sport.” Yet, despite growing condemnation of this cruel tradition, the Spanish government is currently considering whether or not to recommend that bullfighting be protected as a national cultural pastime.

Such a move would be a huge step backward and could provide the legal basis for overruling existing bans on bullfighting in Catalonia and the Canary Islands. Bullfighting has been on the decline for years, with attendance decreasing and bullrings closing across the country as more and more people put animal welfare first. Seventy-six percent of Spaniards say that they have no interest in this barbaric ritual, and the industry survives only because of huge subsidies.

Spain is a country rich in history, architecture, cinema, art, and culture. We need to let authorities know that protecting bullfighting will damage Spain’s reputation and can only have a negative impact on the tourism industry, which is so important to the country’s economy.

Please write to Spain’s ambassador to the U.S. and ask him to oppose protection for bullfighting. The government’s decision is imminent, so take action today!

5. Background | Force Change

Target: Thai Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment

Goal: Protect the endangered Asian elephant by prohibiting the illegal smuggling of Burmese elephants into Thailand.

A recent film by the Ecologist Film Unit exposing the violent and illegal trade of endangered Asian elephants from Burma to Thailand raises the need to act now to save these animals from a life in brutal captivity and likely death. After viewing the film here please sign the petition below asking the Thai government to enforce the law on illegal elephant smuggling. At least 100 elephants, mostly calves, are taken from Burmese forests and traded illegally to supply Thai elephant tourist camps. The journey for the calves and their families is horrific. For every calf taken, approximately five elephants in its family group are shot. The calves then undergo a ritual known as the phajaan, where the calves are tied up, starved, and beaten until a fear of humans is deeply ingrained in them. It is estimated that only one in three elephants survives this torture. Those that do, are than smuggled into Thailand.

The elephants that reach Thailand are subjected to living in captivity, often having their pictures taken with tourists none the wiser to what they have endured. The Thai tourism industry is doing very well and fueling the demand for elephants. A baby elephant can fetch anywhere from $21,000 to $31,000. When traveling toThailand, it is not advised to boycott the camps, as this would lessen the monies available to care for the elephants, but to report suspicious operations. Action needs to be taken at the government level for true change to occur.

Traditionally, attention has been given to the African elephant sought after for its ivory tusks. However, the Asian elephant population is in critical danger. Already listed as endangered, it is estimated that there are 25,000 to 35,000 left in the wild, far fewer than those in Africa. Burma’s population is second only to India with approximately 5,000 elephants. If trade continues as it is, the population could be decimated within ten years.

By signing this petition you are urging the Thai government to tighten and enforce laws against illegal smuggling of elephants into Thailand.

6. Background | Change

Donkey roping is torture. Not only does it inflict serious damage to donkeys physically, but also causes mental trauma. Physical damage includes rope burns to the legs and neck, crushed tracheae, broken legs, and death. Donkeys often become difficult to handle and extremely fearful of people after being roped. This terrible practice needs to be stopped in Texas. The only way to do that is to show the support of the people to stop it!

once upon a planet so blue,
the sun shone brightly,
her job to do.
then darkness fell,
the sun did what she can,
but she was helpless against
the cruelties of man.
so help her find her shining rays,
and show the world
a better way.

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

Kinship Circle

Please click HERE to protest

Source Kinship Circle

Huntingdon Life Sciences faced financial ruin. But US Bank’s $120 million loan kept them open to poison dogs, cats, monkeys and more animals in tests for pesticides, sweeteners, diet pills… So today animals still collapsed, frothing at the mouth. Dogs who didn’t get enough anesthesia “whimpered and moved” while cut apart.

US Bank is currently Huntingdon’s top debt-relief source. Though made aware of 7 investigations that reveal habitual animal abuse and fraudulent science, the bank approved this mega loan. Apparently US Bancorp doesn’t see animal cruelty as reason to blacklist a company, as it does with illegal gun sellers, gambling websites, etc. Like hundreds of other firms that dumped HLS, US Bank has access to footage and documents about techs who punch beagle puppies, dissect live animals, falsify data, and botch experiments so badly that animals seize and die on the spot.

Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty UK launched a global campaign in 1999, with unified U.S. action a few years later. Anti-HLS efforts target the lab’s infrastructure: Financiers, customers and suppliers are strongly urged to dump HLS in ongoing letter/phone/email campaigns and live protests. Any company with ties to HLS is exposed to evidence of animal abuse. While HLS has teetered on the edge of shutdown, straddled with a $100 million debt, some financier always seems to bail them out. Ask US Bank to end its association with HLS and terminate the current loan agreement.

Please note that some of the addresses will be returned as invalid.

to the ethically aware
and morally sound,
US bank is funding
terrorism,
and we stand
our ground!!!

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

Wikimedia Commons

1. Harvard to Close Primate Facility after Pressure | Source PCRM

Following two years of pressure from PCRM and other groups, Harvard University announced today that it will close its primate experimentation facility where numerous monkeys have died and been seriously injured in recent years. This move is a step in the right direction—away from cruel and scientifically misguided research—and PCRM’s members played a big role by sending Harvard more than 30,000 e-mails last summer. With your help, we did it!

The closure will affect the 2,000 monkeys currently at the New England Primate Research Center in Southborough, Mass. PCRM will call on Harvard and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to retire those animals to sanctuaries rather than send them to other research facilities.

In September 2011, PCRM issued its report Animal Welfare Act Violations at Ivy League Universities, which detailed how a primate (later revealed to be a highly endangered cotton-top tamarin) was found dead in a cage at the Harvard facility after going through a machine that uses near-boiling water and caustic chemicals to wash cages.

Following PCRM’s report, other accounts of animal deaths and mistreatment continued to surface, including:

• A marmoset was found to have died after escaping, being captured, and then undergoing an imaging procedure. PCRM’s sources from within the primate center claimed that the marmoset was traumatized during his capture and that he was hyperventilating and distressed when he was forced into the constricting imaging tube.
• A cotton-top tamarin died of dehydration as a result of not having a water bottle in his cage.
• A primate died after being overdosed with anesthetics.

PCRM took this evidence of animal cruelty to the United States Department of Agriculture and NIH’s Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare and called on the agencies to investigate Harvard.

PCRM also charged Harvard with violating the federal Endangered Species Act by negligently harming and killing cotton-top tamarins in a complaint filed with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service in July 2012. Harvard responded by claiming that it would relocate its nearly 170 tamarins—critically endangered monkeys native to Colombia—to “other institutions, such as wildlife preserves or sanctuaries.” The complaint is still pending.

PCRM is still urging Harvard to retire its tamarins, and now we are pushing the school and NIH to do the same with all 2,000 primates. As we move forward, you will hear more from us.

Thank you for your continued support.

2. Israel: a bill to ban the imports of fatty goose and duck liver | Source AR News

A bill to ban the import and sale of fatty gooe and duck liver (“foie-gras”) was introduced yesterday (April 22nd, 2013) in the Israeli Knesset. The bill was introduced by 23 Knesset members (fifth of the 120 members), from almost all parties, led by Knesset Member.

The bill, if enacted, will be a complementary step to the decision of the Israeli Supreme Court 10 years ago to ban on the force-feeding of geese and ducks in Israel. In the 1990′s, when the Israeli campaign against force-feeding of geese and ducks started, Israel was one of the world’s leading producers of fatty liver. The precedential Court Decision led to the closing of the industry and still underpins campaigns against other common cruel practices. In drafting and promoting the current bill, Anonymous for Animal Right and Let the Animals Live hope to stop the imports of fatty liver to Israel and to set the principle that cruelty is unacceptable – whether done locally or abroad, by oneself or by one’s money.

“Foie gras” is the pathologically-greasy and swollen liver of geese and ducks. To bring the liver to this diseased state, the industry force-feeds the bird with growing quantities of high-calorie gruel – up to one third of the bird’s weight per day. The gruel is forced down the bird’s esophagus using a tube, which is connected to an air-pressure-operated machine, or a similar technique. The sick ducks have difficulty breathing and walking. Their slaughter time is chosen so that not too many of them would die before being taken to the slaughterhouse.

Force-feeding of geese and ducks is already banned also in Italy, the UK, Poland, The Czech Republic, Luxemburg, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Australia, Argentine and California.

California also bans the sale of the fatty liver which is the objective of this form of animal-abuse.

Please thank MK Rabbi Dov Lipman on his initiative:

Email: dlipman@knesset.gov.il

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dov.lipman?fref=ts

Mailing address: MK Dov Lipman, the Knesset, Jerusalem , Israel

3. The Norwegian Labour Party adds fur ban to the party manifesto | Source Norwegian Animal Protection Alliance

Victory! The Norwegian Labour Party adds fur ban to the party manifesto

The Labour Party Congress has today (21st April 2013) voted to add a ban on fur farming to the party manifesto.

This addition to the manifesto follows the resolution to put an end to fur farming, as decided at the 2011 Party Congress.

While this stance is not new for the party, the inclusion of a fur ban into the manifesto commits the party to this work for the next four years.

This inclusion in the manifesto is an important signal in Norwegian politics, in particular to the right-wing partys like the Conservative Party.

The Norwegian Animal Protection Alliance has been working towards this point for the past 10 years. Through intense lobbying including letters, flyers and phone calls targeting many hundreds of local politicians the active work of the Labour Party towards a Norwegian ban on fur farming has today been secured.

The Norwegian Labour Party are currently in Goverment, together with the Socialist Left Party and the Centre Party. The Labour and Socialist Left Parties wish to ban fur farming, however the Centre Party wish to keep fur farming in Norway. This strong signal from the Party Congress this weekend should provide incentive for negotiations regarding this issue between the Government parties.

This is an important milestone, and it is wonderful news for animal welfare in Norway. Our work will now focus on the Conservative Party in the future, however this will require a very different campaigning strategy, says information manager to the Norwegian Animal Protection Alliance, Live Kleveland.


4. Vietnam Airlines to stops shipping primates | Source PETA

As you know, for more than two years, PETA has been asking Vietnam Airlines to stop shipping primates to misery and death in laboratories. Monkeys shipped to laboratories are crammed into small wooden crates, then stuffed into the cargo holds of airplanes, often under the feet of unsuspecting passengers. Some of these monkeys are ripped from their homes in the wild, others are bred on squalid monkey factory farms. When they reach their final destination, they are confined to tiny cages and tormented in cruel experiments.

Now, after hearing from more than 100,000 compassionate supporters like you, Vietnam Airlines has informed PETA that, starting today, it will no longer ship primates to laboratories.

But our work is not over. PETA will continue to strengthen our efforts against the remaining few airlines engaged in this cruel practice so that fewer primates will suffer and die in laboratories and more monkeys will be left where they belong: in the wild.

We need your help. Please take a moment to urge Philippine Airlines to join Vietnam Airlines and nearly every other major airline in the world by refusing to transport primates to laboratories.

sometimes we want to turn away,
we cannot do this another day,
and then we hear that little voice,
that reminds us that when
something good happens,
we all rejoice.
so do not worry,
being discouraged is okay,
but we keep on going,
anyway ☺♥☻

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

PETA has obtained disturbing undercover video footage of cats being subjected to cruel medical training exercises in a course called Pediatric Advanced Life Support (PALS) conducted at Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL) in conjunction with St. Louis Children’s Hospital.

Despite the availability of superior, lifelike infant simulators, which are used instead of animals at other medical facilities around the country, WUSTL continues to lock nine cats in its laboratories and have trainees repeatedly force hard plastic tubes down their delicate windpipes in a crude attempt to teach students how to intubate human infants. Of the more than 1,000 PALS training facilities, WUSTL appears to be the last facility in the country that is still abusing cats in the course, in defiance of modern science and ethics.

In the video, several unskilled trainees are seen struggling for several minutes to intubate two vulnerable cats named Elliott and Jessie as they repeatedly shove tubes down the cats’ windpipes and mishandle metal instruments in a manner that can break the cats’ teeth.

The cats are supposed to be anesthetized, but several participants in the video state that the cats they used began to wake up in the middle of the procedure.

The footage also shows a WUSTL veterinarian discussing how each cat is subjected to as many as 15 intubations each session. Yet, studies show that intubating animals more than five times in these trainings can cause them pain and trauma. WUSTL’s veterinarian and course leader also both admit that some cats’ windpipes are injured during the exercise, which can cause bleeding, swelling, scarring, collapsed lungs, and even death. Each of the nine cats used by WUSTL is subjected to this painful procedure up to four times a year for three years.

WUSTL continues to torment these cats even though research has shown that lifelike infant simulators better teach trainees to intubate babies than practicing on animals.

The American Heart Association (AHA), which creates the curriculum for and sponsors the PALS course, also strongly opposes animal use in the program, previously stating that “the AHA recommends that any hands-on intubation training for the AHA PALS course be performed on lifelike human manikins.” In the video, WUSTL’s veterinarian shamefully tells trainees that the AHA has taken this position only because animal laboratories are too expensive for most facilities. However, when asked subsequently by PETA if this was the reason it did not support animal use, the AHA clearly stated, “We do not endorse or require the use of animals during the AHA-PALS training because of advances and availability of simulation mannequins.”

For years, PETA has been pushing WUSTL to end its use of animals for intubation training, including with protests and ad campaigns.

Please help us protect animals by urging WUSTL to modernize its medical training program.

2. Background

The end of Canada’s annual baby seal slaughter is near. Over the last few years, all major markets have banned seal-fur imports, including the U.S., the European Union, Mexico, Taiwan, and even Russia, which had been importing 95 percent of Canadian seal pelts. There are no remaining markets for seal fur—the only reason the Canadian government continues to defend this dead industry is because political parties crave Newfoundland’s swing seats in Parliament. But as this editorial shows, even local sentiment is turning, and lack of markets has led Canadian officials to seriously examine whether the slaughter should end.

We’ve reached a tipping point. The time is now to urge Minister of Fisheries and Oceans Keith Ashfield, Minister of Foreign Affairs John Baird, and Minister of International Trade Ed Fast to help bring the commercial seal slaughter to an immediate end by supporting a government buyout.

3. Background

The U.S. Navy has been using our oceans as a staging ground for target practice for more than 30 years — leaching highly toxic and cancer-causing chemicals into the sea. This practice, known as SINKEX, is currently exempt from laws that protect marine life from dangerous substances.

But that could change this month because the Environmental Protection Agency is considering revoking this exemption.

Through SINKEX, the Navy uses old warships for torpedo and gunnery practice — sinking the old vessels at sea. In the past decade alone, the Navy has disposed of more than 100 vessels through this program.

Old ships contain toxic materials, including polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs. PCBs have been banned in the United States since 1979 because they’re known to cause cancer. When the ships are sunk, these chemicals leak into the ocean and harm all levels of the food web, including fish, whales and dolphins.

Please use the form to take action now. Tell the EPA that our oceans are not a toxic waste dump and that the Navy should dispose of old war ships in a safe, responsible manner.

4. Background

Justin Bieber just can’t seem to stay out of the animal-exploitation spotlight. This time, for having his 14-week-old capuchin monkey confiscated in late March when he tried to bring her into Germany illegally on his private jet.

Mally had been with Bieber for at least a month; even now she is way too young to be without her mother. Such a traumatic uprooting has been shown to create serious life-long problems, sometimes even death.

“At our Born Free USA Primate Sanctuary we have witnessed firsthand the amazing transformation monkeys can make given a supportive and nurturing environment,” says our sanctuary’s director, Tim Ajax.

Bieber has a chance to right this wrong and relinquish Mally so that she can immediately go to a sanctuary and live with her peers. If he decides to fight for custody, it could mean months — even years — before Mally gets that second, better chance at life.

Please tell the pop megastar to do the right thing and make a “belieber” out of us all!

5. Background

***Please note that Our Compass does not believe that dogs are more important than cattle, fish, or lizards.  All animals are equal and deserve compassion and respect.  This is an important alert that demands protection to one population of animals, yet any alert that spotlights a specific species, in order to implement protections, would be published as well.

Dogs (and cats) are suffering horrific cruelty because of the dog meat trade in South East Asia. Dogs piled on top of each other in tiny cages for days, and then boiled alive, electrocuted or beaten to death.

How can we stop this horrific cruelty? One answer is to slow the demand for meat by convincing local restaurants to stop buying and serving dog (and cat) meat. Please help us support local organizations in South East Asia employing this critical tactic. Sign your name below and we’ll provide this list of thousands of names to organizations trying to convince local restaurants to stop buying and serving dog meat. If we use our voices collectively the impact will be so much greater and this shocking cruelty will cease.

Sign this petition and tell all restaurants with dog meat on their menu to “STOP serving dog (and cat) meat!

6. Background

Help ensure continued protections for wolves across the lower-48 states! You can make a difference by writing to Obama administration officials to urge them not to drop federal protections for wolves across much of the United States.

In the next 2-3 months, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service may remove federal Endangered Species Act protections for gray wolves across nearly the entire lower-48 states. This would be a disastrous setback for gray wolf recovery in the United States.

The recovery of gray wolves is an American success story, from their reintroduction in the northern Rocky Mountains to their comeback in the western Great Lakes states. But there are few, if any, gray wolves in the vast majority of their former range. If the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service removes gray wolf federal protections, wolves in the Pacific Northwest, California, the southern Rocky Mountains, and the Northeast will face even more difficult odds than they do already.

It is critical that the administration not proceed with a blanket national delisting of the gray wolf, when wolves are still missing across so much of the U.S. landscape.

Urge President Obama, Secretary of Interior Sally Jewell, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe to maintain protections for gray wolves in the lower-48 states.

7. Background

Each year, countless fragile chicks, ducklings, and even reptiles are shipped nationwide by the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). Many of these animals are injured or killed when packages are delayed, roughly handled, dropped, crushed, or left in extreme temperatures. Last summer, 1,000 baby chicks were found dead during 105-degree weather at a mail-processing plant in Louisville, Kentucky. While the USPS currently prohibits the shipment of most live birds (excluding day-old poultry), the agency is now considering relaxing this restriction and allowing the shipment of any adult bird weighing up to 25 pounds! This means that countless more animals would suffer and die in transit. The USPS is currently seeking public comment, and your voice is needed!

Please use the form to urge the USPS to ban ALL live shipments of animals. Be sure to include your mailing address in the letter, and do not change the “Live Animals “subject line (otherwise, your comment may go unread). Please also share this alert widely!
8. Background

In 2007, the European Union introduced the “REACH” regulation to provide for the Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of Chemicals — more than 30,000 of them.

REACH requires a long list of animal tests, which means horrific suffering from chemical poisoning and death for millions of rabbits, mice and other creatures. But REACH also requires the use of animal testing alternatives where available, including measures to revise the regulation itself to reflect scientific progress on alternatives.

In April 2012, HSI submitted a comprehensive proposal to the European Commission calling for major changes to REACH testing requirements to spare millions of animals while providing the same level of regulatory scrutiny of chemicals.

We’re still waiting… and every day the Commission delays, more animals suffer and die needlessly.

9. Background

A citizens’ initiative that aims to protect bullfighting is due to be discussed by the Spanish Congress in the coming weeks.

The threat of this new law passing could result in:

• more public money being spent to promote bullfighting
• changes in education that portray bullfighting in a positive way to children
• potentially even overturning the current bullfighting bans in autonomous regions such as Catalonia

Send a letter to the Spanish Ambassador to Canada and let them know the international community will not accept this proposal.

Please help us now:

The torment and death of animals for amusement, or for cultural reasons, should never be acceptable. Email the Spanish government today to let them know the international community will not accept this proposal.

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

how lovely a place this world
could be,
if humans had a sense of
humanity.

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

Wikimedia Commons

Did you know that helping animals in labs also helps the environment? In addition to the suffering and bad science resulting from animal use, NEAVS asks you give thought to the tons of dead bodies disposed every year by biomedical and pharmaceutical industries. Labeled “biological waste,” let’s never forget they were all once living, thinking, and feeling animals whose short lives were cruelly sacrificed to ineffective science and indefensible ethics. To help the Earth, her animals, and humans, here are three things you can do.

• Support alternatives to animal testing: Toxicity and product testing uses living animals to test hazardous substances. Tests such as those for acute toxicity slowly poisons them with more and more doses of a substance – all without any relief for their pain and suffering. Those who do not die are killed at the end. Millions of bodies, many of which are considered pathogenic or hazardous waste, must be disposed – ending up in our water, soil, and air. Call 1-888-INFO-FDA (1-888-463-6332) or email the U.S. Federal Drug Administration and ask them to require alternatives and stop permitting archaic animal-based testing.

SAMPLE LETTER

To Whom It Concerns,

I am shocked to learn that companies continue to support animal experimentation. Considered archaic and fundamentally flawed, product testing on animals lacks corporate legitimacy and social validation. Indeed, despite using deceptive statements and misleading assertions fabricated by clever marketing and publicity departments, companies that subject animals to product testing are NOT legally mandated to do so, and knowledgeable consumers are demanding discontinuation of such unnecessary and vicious tests. Furthermore, it is imperative to recognize the existence of ingredients that already have an established, proven safety record for human use. These products, such as those found on the FDA GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) list, can be utilized and manufactured in the absence of deliberately cruel and unwarranted animal experimentation. The blatant disregard for animals and decisions to not use GRAS ingredients exclusively is irresponsible and negligent.  Please use your authority to demand that companies discontinue using animals.

Furthermore, an attempt to foster an idea that consumers continually support animal experimentation due to some inaccurate notion that it will prevent them from being harmed is unprincipled. Product misuse and abuse can lead to harm regardless of how many animals are wrongfully killed during the product testing phase. In fact, corporate manipulation and exploitation of consumer fear by using deceptive advertising is not only unethical but it is also illegal. As such, as long as certain companies continue to unnecessarily and selfishly capitalize on the mutilation, torture, and death of animals, I will not financially support them; furthermore, I will share this information with family, friends, colleagues, and members of online communities as well.

Please make both the ethical and financially-responsible decision to demand a discontinuation of animal experimentation immediately and requiring ethical alternatives instead: join an increasing body of corporations, companies, and entities that are listening to a concerned and attentive consumer population who refuse to be complicit in the inherently malicious industry of animal experimentation.

Thank you for your attention to this urgent appeal.

NAME

• Go cruelty-free product shopping: Cruelty-free products – as well as the processes by which they are produced – are more environmentally friendly than those tested on animals, less likely to contain harmful chemicals, more likely to use natural substances, and safer for you, the Earth, and the animals. Email or visit NEAVS for free Leaping Bunny cruelty-free shopping guides and apps.

• Support alternatives in education: Many animals are taken from natural habitats and used for dissection, contributing to the depletion of species diversity and ecosystem imbalance. Preserving and discarding specimens carries environmental risks. Toxic chemicals such as formaldehyde, identified as a carcinogen and designated a hazardous air and water pollutant, are used to preserve. The toxic waste generated by specimen dissection is dangerous for students, teachers, the public, and the Earth (read more). Call your schools to make certain students can choose cruelty-free alternatives to specimen dissection.

why upon us do you test,
rob us of our lives,
our chances to nest.
lock us in cold labs,
where we can only
anticipate,
the most painful,
and tragic,
cruelties of fate.
stop this madness,
stop it today.
another moment we
cannot bear
to live this way.

signed,
all the animals in labs

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

(Please note you may need to sign in to YouTube to confirm age to watch video.)

Please click and sign petition HERE

Background | Source BUAV

New BUAV investigation uncovers appalling animal suffering and wrongdoing at leading UK University

The BUAV has released harrowing footage following an investigation at Imperial College London that sheds new light on the reality of animal experiments in the UK. A BUAV investigator worked for seven months at Imperial College, ranked as one of the best universities in the world, and documented a catalogue of shortcomings and wrongdoing by staff and researchers that caused even more distress and suffering to the animals in its care than was allowed in the experiments. Findings included: breaches in and lack of knowledge of UK Home Office project licences; a failure to provide adequate anaesthesia and pain relief; incompetence and neglect and highly disturbing methods used to kill animals.

The findings from the investigation appeared in the UK Sunday Times on 14th April: http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/uk_news/Science/article1245301.ece

The UK Government and research industry repeatedly claim that the UK has some of the highest welfare standards in the world for animals in laboratories, yet huge secrecy and a lack of transparency surrounds animal research. This BUAV investigation, like many others before, has shown the true reality of animal welfare standards at Imperial with breaches of the regulatory regime and inappropriate licensing and enforcement by the Home Office.

Key concerns raised by the BUAV investigation include:

• Underestimation of the degree of suffering in project licences. Experimental protocols were given a ‘moderate’ limit even when it was foreseen that animals would die and the anticipated adverse effects clearly called for a ‘substantial’ classification of the research. One research project involved kidney transplantation, a major procedure by any standard. Some rats had both their kidneys removed via abdominal surgery and were left with just one (transplanted) kidney.

• Poor monitoring of animals resulting in suffering and breaches of humane endpoints (the point at which further suffering must not take place). In one case, where mice were found to be in a distressed state on a Monday morning, a senior technician stated: ‘I am so disgusted. Those poor mice’ and ‘If the Home Office was in we would have been screwed if they saw those mice.’

• Researchers lacking knowledge of the severity limits of their project licences, and the humane endpoints they were supposed to apply. When asked about the severity limits on their licences, many researchers did not know. One said: ‘So do I get to call a friend?’. Not knowing the severity levels and endpoints could result in animals being subjected to even more pain and suffering than permitted.

• Poor application of the methods used for killing animals, leading to unnecessary suffering, and the controversial use of a guillotine to carry out live decapitation.

• Poor surgical and other procedures resulting in animal deaths and suffering. One researcher, for example, raised concerns about the competence of a colleague: ‘I think you should keep an eye on XXX because he makes many mistakes.’

• Unsupervised researchers, with little experience, anaesthetising and carrying out surgery on animals. One researcher anaesthetising a rat to re-staple a surgery wound admitted: ‘I’ve never done this before.’ and ‘I only came down here for the first time yesterday so I haven’t even seen these rats before.’

• Failure to provide adequate anaesthesia and analgesics. There were several occasions when animals appeared to be inadequately anaesthetised, either as a consequence of inadequate monitoring, use of inappropriate anaesthesia, or deliberately – due to fears about losses of animals during surgery. One researcher who did not want to wait for hours for a rat to recover from anaesthesia on a Friday afternoon stated: ‘But I won’t give it a full dose. As long as there is enough for it to be not fully under but you know not feeling too much pain.’

Pop music was played at high levels throughout the facility, adding to animals’ distress. The music was even played during surgery itself, while animals were recovering, and during killing.

The BUAV is urging the UK Government to:

Revoke the Establishment Licence of Imperial College London;

Set up an inquiry, wholly independent of the Home Office, into the concerns we raise.

Michelle Thew, Chief Executive, BUAV stated: “Despite claims made by the Government and research industry that the UK has the best system of regulation in the world, this shocking BUAV investigation shows that the reality for animals is very different. Standards at this leading UK University were poor with breaches of the regulatory regime and inappropriate licensing and enforcement by the Home Office. This investigation raises significant and far reaching questions about animal research in the UK. A full independent inquiry must be carried out as a matter of urgency. The public will expect no less.”

Investigation film: http://bit.ly/11ae6Pa

(warning: the film contains footage of animal suffering that you may find upsetting)

Website: http://licensedtokill.buav.org

Please sign and share our petition calling on the Home Office: http://chn.ge/116rHpV

Why

why we ask do you hurt us so,
what is it you think that you
are going to know.
how can you see us day
after day,
and still mistreat us in
so cavalier a way.
you humans feign superiority,
but you behaviors reek
of inferiority!

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

Please ask Hartford Hospital president and CEO Jeffrey Flaks to replace this use of pigs with medical simulation

Background | Source PCRM

I am very excited to be able to share with you that Kiki, Alley, and Fiddle, the last three cats used in the University of Virginia’s (UVA) pediatrics residency program to teach endotracheal intubation, have been adopted out after eight years of abuse. PCRM learned of the change when we received documents via a state public records request.

This change is the result of PCRM’s campaign that began in September 2010 and the support of our members – including retired pediatrician Roberta Grey, M.D., who started a Change.org petition that received more than 185,000 signatures from people asking UVA to stop this practice. PCRM filed federal and state complaints against UVA’s animal use and held a demonstration outside the president’s office, and more than 200,000 supporters e-mailed UVA’s administrators encouraging the university to take this progressive step.

In this training, pediatrics residents and other trainees repeatedly forced breathing tubes down the throats of Kiki, Alley, Fiddle, and other cats. This practice can cause tracheal bruising, bleeding, scarring, severe pain, and permanent injury.

UVA now joins the 98 percent of pediatrics residency programs in the United States and Canada that view nonanimal methods as not only more humane but educationally superior.

Unfortunately, live pigs are being killed in Advanced Trauma Life Support training at Hartford Hospital. Please ask Hartford Hospital president and CEO Jeffrey Flaks to replace this use of pigs with medical simulation.

Thank you again for all of your support. Without it PCRM would not be able to secure victories like this for animals still used in medical education and for the future infant patients of today’s pediatrics residents.

Piggies being piggies, not bacon
nor fodder for labs.
we want to live life as
piggies,
not on plates or cold
slabs!

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

Wikimedia Commons

You can help by taking action at PETA.org/AirCruelty!

Background | Source PETA

I have exciting news to share! Thanks in large part to your phone calls and support, Hainan Airlines has just confirmed to PETA that it will maintain its ban on shipping primates to laboratories. In a written statement, Hainan representatives said they “fully agree” with PETA on this issue and that they support our “effort in the protection of animal rights.”

Because no China-based airline is willing to get involved in this cruel practice, primate experimenters have no easy or feasible route to import primates to the United States from China. This means that more monkeys will remain with their families in the wild and fewer monkeys will suffer a fate worse than death in laboratories, where monkeys are commonly force-fed experimental chemicals, cut up, addicted to drugs, and killed. PETA will remain vigilant to ensure that no airline starts or resumes shipping monkeys to laboratories under pressure from the cruel primate experimentation industry.

Only three major international airlines still ship monkeys to laboratories: Vietnam Airlines, Philippine Airlines, and Air France. PETA will continue to increase our pressure on these airlines until they stop delivering primates to laboratories. You can help by taking action at PETA.org/AirCruelty!

each life that is saved,
each forward move
a path toward kindness,
and the compassionate
groove.
we thank you hainan
for being a part,
not ruled by the $$$
but instead, by the
heart!

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

oday, PCRM filed a complaint with the Quebec City Director of Criminal and Penal Proceedings in Canada, explaining that Laval University is violating the province’s animal cruelty law by using and killing piglets. Please help this effort by asking the dean of Laval University Faculty of Medicine, Rénald Bergeron, M.D., to end the use of animals for pediatrics residency training today.

In the pediatrics residency program at Laval, each resident is instructed to make an incision between a piglet’s ribs, insert tubes into the chest cavity, insert a needle into the abdominal
cavity, cut open and insert a needle into the animal’s veins, and insert a needle under the breast bone and into the sac surrounding the heart. The piglet is then killed and residents are instructed to make incisions in the animal’s throat, into which a tube is inserted. Nonanimal training methods exist, making this use of animals not only cruel but completely unnecessary.

For more than one year, the responsible Laval faculty and administrators have ignored pleas to change this practice. Please e-mail Dr. Bergeron and urge him to end this cruel and unnecessary practice. Send an automatic e-mail.

Laerdal’s infant simulators SimBaby and SimNewB, CAE Healthcare’s Babysim, and Simulab’s TraumaChild can all be used to teach the procedures taught in Laval’s pediatrics residency training.

Ninety-eight percent of pediatrics residency programs in the United States and Canada use only nonanimal methods, including all 16 other pediatrics programs in Canada. It is time for Laval to join the majority. Please e-mail Dr. Bergeron today and ask him to replace the use of animals in Laval’s pediatrics residency program.

2. Background | Source Big Cat Rescue

Last March when we told you the Sarasota County Agricultural Fair (Florida) had an exhibitor charging patrons to pet and have photos taken with a tiny tiger cub, more than 1200 of you called and emailed the fair’s management asking them to please not allow this exploitation of big cat cubs. Some of you even protested outside the fairgrounds.

Unfortunately, we’ve just learned that the Sarasota County Fair is at it again this week. They have a different exhibitor this year but the abuse is the same: a lion cub is being used for profit by the exhibitor who is charging people to pet and take photos with him. In addition, this exhibitor has an adult tiger confined in a tiny transport cage. We are told from concerned visitors to the fair that the display is right next to a loud motocross bike show. According to eye witnesses, the tiger appears so distressed by the noise and fumes that he is continually pacing and trying desperately to get out of the cage.

Success in changing people’s mindsets often takes persistence. With your help in repeatedly contacting the fair’s management about the issue of cub abuse, the fair’s management will see that many Americans do NOT condone using big cats and cubs in these money-making schemes. And that it is bad business for the fair to have these displays because it negatively affects their reputation among the many, many people who love animals and do not want to see them exploited to make money.

In the form below, we make it easy for you to send an email that will go to the management at the Sarasota County Fair, the International Association of Fairs and Expos, the Mayor of Sarasota, the Sarasota County Commissioners and the Sarasota County Administrator. You can make an even bigger impact by also taking the time to call and tell these people that you oppose big cats at fairs – it is cruel to breed them for this purpose and then cart them around in cramped trailers for months at a time in order to make money off of them.

You are the only voice this lion cub and tiger have and they are counting on you to roar for them! Thank you in advance for speaking up for the cats.

3. Background | Source PETA

In late 2011, national attention was focused on Johnson City, New York, after PETCO and its workers abandoned hundreds of caged animals in its store there and dozens drowned in massive flooding caused by Tropical Storm Lee.

After 16 months of repeated public-records requests, PETA has obtained police records from the incident, while doing its own digging. PETCO workers’ failures to do the right thing for the animals in their charge are even worse than anyone imagined.

Remember when PETCO Vice President Marcie Whichard called the flooding “completely unpredictable?” Well, it turns out that the flooding was the subject of at least 15 National Weather Service watches, warnings, and forecasts beginning before dawn on September 6, 2011.

That’s 36 hours before PETCO managers and employees abandoned the animals who later drowned.

PETCO reopened the location in April 2012, but—likely due largely to the community outcry following the drowning—it no longer sells animals there.

You can help ensure that no animal is ever again abandoned to drown in a PETCO store. Please urge PETCO to stop selling all animals in its stores that are located in flood plains or are prone to flooding.

4. Background | Source ALDF

ALDF needs your help to support passage of the “PUPS Act” (S. 395). Thousands of dogs are suffering immensely in “puppy mills”—large-scale, unethical commercial dog-breeding facilities—so they can be sold to unsuspecting consumers. Dogs produced in puppy mills not only endure terrible conditions before purchase, but are prone to contagious disease, heart and hip problems, and serious breathing difficulties. Meanwhile, millions of dogs are euthanized in animal shelters every year because they haven’t been adopted in forever homes.

5. Background | Source PETA

To produce down pillows, comforters, or jackets, birds are often pinned down as hurried workers yank fistfuls of feathers from the birds’ sensitive bodies while they are still alive, often plucking them so violently that they rip open the birds’ delicate skin, and then sew up the gaping wounds using a needle and thread and no painkillers.

Buying down can also support the cruelty of the foie gras and meat industries because many farmers who raise birds for food make an extra profit by selling their feathers as well. When these birds are sent to slaughter, their throats are slit—often while fully conscious—and many are scalded to death in defeathering tanks. All down comes from birds who suffer and die violently and painfully.

Caesars (which owns Caesars Palace, Harrah’s, Planet Hollywood, Paris, Rio, Flamingo, Bally’s, and many more) clearly understands the benefits of cruelty-free synthetic materials—the company uses synthetic bedding in all of its hotel rooms except a few at Caesars Palace.

Please join us in asking Caesars to drop down in all its hotel rooms.

6. Background | Source PCRM

The Department of Defense (DOD) has missed a deadline set by Congress to set a plan for phasing out the use of animals. In December, Congress passed the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act, which called on the DOD to issue a report by March 1, 2013, that includes a strategy for transitioning to the use of human-based methods in combat trauma training courses. This was a huge victory and was the first time Congress has held the DOD accountable on this issue.

But we still need your help.

Instead of working on a strategy to replace the use of live animals in training, the Army’s Medical Command has made plans to continue the use of live goats in combat trauma training for the next five years!

Please write the Army Surgeon General, Lt. Gen. Patricia Horoho, and Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs, Jonathan Woodson, M.D., and ask them to replace the use of live animals in combat trauma training with the many human-based medical simulators available.

With the availability of several such simulators, the use of live animals in combat trauma training is unnecessary. Please tell Lt. Gen Horoho and Dr. Woodson to stop Army Medical Command’s plans to extend the use of live goats for five more years.

Thank you for all of your help.

i would like to bake
a compassionate cake
to create a world of giving
and less of take
where loving kindness
is the norm
not one where cruelty
attacks in swarms
♥

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

After 19 years, Ireland has just resumed its live-export trade with Libya – a decision that condemns thousands of animals to immense suffering and represents a major step backwards for Irish agriculture.

On the night of 19 February, almost 3,000 cows were loaded onto the Al Mahmoud Express and dispatched on a long and terrifying voyage to Libya, where they faced a cruel and painful death. After enduring 10 days of misery aboard the severely crowded ship, the animals were killed in North African slaughterhouses, which often handle animals with a barbarity that would be illegal in the European Union.

Cows are intelligent animals with diverse personalities. They can remember faces, and they mourn the loss of their friends and loved ones. There is no way that the Irish government can guarantee that even minimum welfare standards are met once the animals leave Irish soil. Undercover investigators in the Middle East have documented that abattoir workers literally dragged cows and sheep to their deaths, slashed the tendons on their legs, poked or stabbed them in the eyes and killed them with blunt knives without stunning them first.

Sadly, this is likely to be the first of many live-animal trades between Ireland and Libya – unless we take action now to prevent any more animals from experiencing a similarly horrific fate. Please ask the Irish Agriculture Minister to put a stop to any further live-export shipments.


2. Background

Air France is one of the largest traffickers of primates in the world. The airline claims to be “making the sky the best place on Earth” – so why does it continue to ship terrified monkeys to laboratories to face imprisonment and torture?

Almost every other major airline in the world has shown compassion by refusing to transport monkeys for animal testing – including United, Aer Lingus, Air China, American, British Airways, Cathay Pacific, China Southern, Delta, Lufthansa and Qantas. Air France even cancelled an individual shipment of primates after a public outcry by PETA and its supporters. Now we must convince the airline to end this barbarism once and for all.

Many of the monkeys Air France flies to laboratories have been snatched from the wild and ripped away from their families. Crammed into tiny wooden crates in the cargo holds of passenger flights, they endure a dark and terrifying journey. After landing, the animals are transported to facilities such as Shin Nippon Biomedical Laboratories and Covance in the US, where they face horrors such as mutilation, poisoning, food deprivation, infection with painful diseases and psychological torment.

Please ask Air France to stop giving primates a one-way ticket to experimentation and death. Tell officials that you won’t be flying with the airline until it ends this cruel practice!


3. Background

The city of Clovis, New Mexico, plans to cruelly poison ground squirrels who live in and around Ned Houk Park in an attempt to prevent the animals from moving into neighboring properties. The indiscriminate poison Rozol will be used—it causes convulsions, vomiting, internal bleeding, gradual cardiac collapse, and a variety of other reactions that result in immense suffering and a slow, agonizing death. Death can take days. Poisons also pose definitive risks to nontarget companion animals and wildlife who come into contact with the bait or tainted carcasses. The poison is scheduled to be set this week, and your voice is needed!

Using the form HERE, please politely urge city officials to scrap this cruel and dangerous plan. If ground squirrel control is insisted upon, officials should advise residents about the many humane, effective methods available to keep unwanted prairie dogs away. Please forward this message widely!


4. Background

The University of California-San Francisco (UCSF)—which receives half a billion dollars a year in taxpayer funds for research—has a long history of abusing mice, monkeys, and other animals imprisoned in its laboratories and violating federal animal welfare laws and guidelines. New documents obtained by PETA reveal that these miserable conditions continue to plague the more than 1 million animals in UCSF’s laboratories.

Government reports and internal UCSF records document more than 100 violations of federal animal welfare laws and guidelines in just the past few years. Among the dozens of violations:

Experimenters didn’t provide pain relief to mice and rats who had their skulls, backs, and abdomens cut into.
Experimenters placed live newborn mice inside a freezer meant for dead animals.
Experimenters cut out both of a rabbit’s eyes in an unapproved surgery.
Experimenters cut the toes off of mice without pain relief, and mice died from dehydration because staff failed to notice that they didn’t have any water.

A rhesus monkey named Peanut was subjected to multiple invasive brain surgeries and was deliberately deprived of food so that he would perform tasks while locked in a restraint chair. Peanut lost 25 percent of his body weight, but it was only after he was killed that experimenters realized that Peanut’s jaw didn’t open properly and that he probably hadn’t been able to chew food.

A monkey named Squinty suffered with chronic dermatitis for more than a year. Red rashes and open lesions covered his body, and one medical report noted that the condition was so severe that there was “[n]o normal skin to provide a comparison.”

Another monkey named Petra was subjected to invasive brain experiments and suffered chronic and painful complications, including a terrible bacterial infection in the wound where her head had been cut open. Experimenters continued to torment Petra for nearly two years despite her deteriorating health. She rapidly began to lose weight, circled endlessly in her cage, and ripped out her own hair.

UCSF’s history of violating federal animal welfare laws and guidelines dates back more than 15 years and includes a $92,500 fine that the university was forced to pay in 2005 for dozens of violations of the Animal Welfare Act.

National Institutes of Health (NIH) policies require facilities receiving taxpayer money to abide by animal welfare laws and guidelines as a condition of their receiving grants, but last year, UCSF received more than $500 million in taxpayer money—half of which was likely spent on experiments involving animals—even though it continues to regularly violate these provisions.

Please join PETA and call on NIH to cut taxpayer funding for experiments on animals at UCSF.


5. Background

The North Face stuffs its jackets and sleeping bags with feathers from birds who are force-fed for the cruel production of foie gras. Force-feeding is a painful process in which birds have tubes rammed down their throats and their stomachs pumped so full of corn mush that their livers swell to as much as 10 times their normal size. Foie gras producers boost their profits by selling the feathers from these force-fed birds.

Other birds used for down are often pinned down as hurried workers yank fistfuls of feathers from the birds’ sensitive bodies while they are still alive, often plucking them so violently that they rip open the birds’ delicate skin, and then sew up the gaping wounds using a needle and thread and no painkillers.

The vast majority of birds used for down spend their entire lives in crowded, filthy conditions on factory farms. When they are sent to slaughter, their throats are slit—often while fully conscious—and many are scalded to death in defeathering tanks. All down comes from birds who suffer and die violently and painfully.

being kind is not too much to ask,
in fact, it is the most wonderful
of tasks.
so spread the words and deeds of
compassion,
heartbeats of love are
forever in fashion!

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

Wikimedia Commons

BACKGROUND | SOURCE BUAV

Pressure on airlines to start transporting primates again as industry has problems finding airlines willing to fly monkeys destined for research.

In the past few months, four key international carriers have stopped the transport of primates for research – Air Canada, Air China, China Eastern Airlines and Continental Airlines. This is having a major impact on the international trade in primates. In particular, laboratories in the USA and Canada are trying hard to secure new airlines willing to become involved in this cruel business or persuade others to lift their embargo.

On 1st March, China Eastern Airlines announced a suspension to the transportation of primates for research purposes. Until then, China Eastern had been one of the main airlines transporting primates from China for research purposes to the USA.

According to a tip-off received by the BUAV, Hainan Airlines has been asked to transport primates from China to Toronto in Canada and Seattle in the USA for research purposes. In February 2012, following a BUAV campaign, Hainan Airlines announced that it would no longer be involved in the transportation of primates for the research industry. However, we understand  that Hainan Airlines is now reconsidering its position but is concerned about bad publicity and has requested that any future involvement remains confidential. We have also been told that China Southern Airlines has been approached regarding its position on transporting primates to the USA. Last year, the airline announced it would suspend transporting primates to Los Angeles Airport.

It is important for Hainan Airlines and China Southern Airlines to know the strength of public feeling on this issue. Please ask both airlines to keep their primate shipment embargo and not change their stance on this important issue. Please write polite emails/letters to the below.

For further information on the BUAV Cargo Cruelty Campaign, see HERE.

WHOM TO CONTACT

Hainan Airlines regional office email webetservice@hnair.com

China Southern Airlines email csnib@csair.com

SAMPLE LETTER

To Whom It Concerns,

I am writing in support of the BUAV Cargo Cruelty campaign.

I was shocked to learn that your airline is involved in the transportation of monkeys to laboratories.  The international trade in primates for research is a global industry that involves misery, suffering, and death on a massive scale. The capture and confinement of such primates causes anxiety and stress. Transportation by air serves only to exacerbate these problems and contributes to further suffering. Primates destined for the research industry are packed into small wooden crates (usually too small to allow them to stand up) and travel as cargo, predominantly on passenger air flights to destinations around the world. In addition to the cramped conditions, the monkeys may have to endure delays, inadequate ventilation, noise, and extreme temperature fluctuations as they are shipped on extremely long journeys to research laboratories across the world.

Other major airlines to have stopped transporting primates for research include British Airways, United Airlines, Northwest Airlines, South African Airways, Delta Airlines, Eva Air, China Airlines, American Airlines, and Caribbean Airlines. There is now only a small number of passenger airlines that continues to be involved in this grim business. Please be certain yours is not one of them.

Thank you for your attention to this urgent appeal.

NAME

we are not cargo
we breathe and we live,
until we get to the lab
where pain is all you humans
have to give.
so how can you send us
to a fate you would yourself
despise.
just picture yourself as
a victim,
when you close your eyes.
so please do not be part of
this death transportation.
we depend on your compassion
and kindness to
be our salvation.

signed,
your fellow primates

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

BACKGROUND | SOURCE IDA

Until March 23, NIH is accepting public input on the chimpanzee retirement recommendations. They have set up a webform for comments, that you can access here. The form on that page has many fields for comments on each specific recommendation, but you can just scroll to the end where it says “Overall Comments” and copy and paste the below message, or submit your own response.

WHOM TO CONTACT

Please click HERE for online contact form.  Please scroll to the very bottom and enter sample letter (or your words) in “Overall Comments” field, enter the number in the box, and then click “Save Survey”


SAMPLE LETTER

I am delighted to learn that the NIH is considering retiring most chimpanzees under its control from research laboratories to sanctuaries. I applaud you and the Working Group on the Use of Chimpanzees in NIH-Supported Research for taking this important step.

I ask that you accept the Working Group’s recommendations, but reject the one recommendation that NIH maintain a colony of 50 chimpanzees for possible future research. There is neither scientific nor ethical justification to maintain a colony.

I also ask that you and the Council recommend the retirement to sanctuary of those chimpanzees who remain in private laboratories. I understand that since they are not under your jurisdiction, you are not able to render decisions about them, but a positive recommendation from your respected Council would be an invaluable step to according them the freedom the NIH acknowledges they deserve.

What do you see
What do you see when you look at me
The face of your genetic history
Do you see the intelligence, the soul,
The feelings
Of a primate that has suffered
From man’s cruel misdealings
Or do you see a thing
That belongs in a lab
Alive or dead
Lying on a cold slab
Your vision is determined
By your inner brain’s eye
My future depends
Please I do not want
To cry

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

NEAVS

Sign a petition to show your support for companies who do not sell in China.

Source, NEAVS: As of Jan. 1, all products tested on animals are no longer allowed in Israel.

As of March 11, all personal care products and their ingredients sold and manufactured in the E.U. must be cruelty-free.

Both the E.U. and Israeli laws expand earlier bans on cosmetic product testing on animals within their borders. The new laws now ban any animal-tested product manufactured worldwide.

Meanwhile, the government of India is exploring a cosmetic animal testing ban of its own. If India passes a ban, there will be more than a billion people worldwide using only cruelty-free products.

NEAVS, in addition to its U.S.-based work, is part of international coalitions such as the Coalition for Consumer Information on Cosmetics’ Leaping Bunny Program and Cruelty Free International, who all seek to end animal testing worldwide. While we celebrate these worldwide victories, we know it’s long overdue for the U.S. to follow suit. Learn how you can go cruelty-free through Leaping Bunny shopping guides and free mobile apps highlighting certified companies.

In related news, the Paul Mitchell hair care company launched a partnership with Cruelty Free International and has pledged not to sell products in China until it ends animal testing requirements. Sign a petition to show your support for companies who do not sell in China.

NEAVS grants for students at alternatives conference

In January, 13 students intent on careers in alternatives to animal experimentation, testing, and use in education or training attended the 1st International Conference of Alternatives to Animal Experimentation of the Portuguese Society for Humane Education (SPEdH) in Almada, Portugal through the generosity of a NEAVS grant program.

According to Constança Carvalho, a conference organizer, students came away with new understandings about animal use and many said they would pursue careers in alternatives. One attendee noted, “I had given up the idea of becoming a researcher after graduation because I didn’t want to use animals and now I realize I can do more for animals than being a conscientious objector. I can work in the development and validation of alternatives.”

NEAVS 2013 grant winners: Sofia Esteves and Andriana Cabecinhas, marine biology and biotechnology; Tiago Gonçalves, veterinary medicine; Gonçalo Silva, Manuel Mendes, and Célia Feijão, biology; Maria Rocha, Liliane Scarpin, and Ana Oliveira, medicine; Carlota Pina, law; Mafalda Torres, chemistry; Inês Martins, nursing; and Susana Lopes, psychology.

the power of ONE.
we get the job done.
and work we will do,
until cruelty is
gone!!!!

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

Wikimedia Commons

Yesterday (2/25), The Washington Post ran a cover story highlighting PETA’s vigorous and long-standing efforts to stop the U.S. military from shooting, stabbing, dismembering, and killing thousands of goats and pigs each year in crude medical training drills.

Our years of campaigning for the use of more humane and effective training methods recently pinnacled when President Barack Obama signed a bill requiring the Department of Defense to submit to Congress, by this-coming Friday, a detailed strategy and timeline for the phase-out of these deadly exercises. This is the first time in history that Congress has passed a bill that seeks to protect animals from being abused in military training exercises.

As The Washington Post story discusses, this effort was bolstered last year when PETA released disturbing, never-before-seen undercover footage showing live goats as they were stabbed, had their organs yanked out, and had their limbs broken and cut off with tree trimmers during a military training drill, all while the animals moaned and kicked. The video prompted action by federal authorities and Congress and led to an international outcry from compassionate people like you, including high-profile military veterans Oliver Stone, Bob Barker, and Gideon Raff as well as current and former military doctors and medics.

On top of that, PETA researchers and military doctors published a first-of-its-kind study in the military’s own medical journal showing that the U.S. is shamefully one of the last NATO nations that still maims and torments animals for medical training.

In recent years, we’ve convinced the Army and Navy to replace cruel training laboratories involving monkeys, cats, and ferrets in favor of human-like simulators. Now we’re close to ending the abuse of the animals most frequently and violently killed by the military.

Thank you for supporting these efforts. We urge you now to take a moment to write to the Department of Defense so that it hears loud and clear that the public wants an immediate switch from cruel animal laboratories to modern and humane simulation tools.

this is the 21st century,
there is no sane reason to be
cruel.
animals are our compadres,
not experimental
tools.
there are humane alternatives,
simulations you can use.
animal life is to be cherished,
not abused!!!!

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

Wikimedia Commons

Click HERE to sign and send message

Each year, billions of dollars go to fund animal experiments, much of it through United States-taxpayer supported funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The unsuspecting public is led to believe that these experiments are necessary to promote human health and well-being. Indeed, the mission of NIH is to “to extend healthy life and reduce the burdens of illness and disability.”

But under close scrutiny, this claim does not hold up. Federally-funded animal experiments continue year after year, examining the same questions, at huge cost, creating “animal models” for diseases and conditions that are uniquely human, like smoking and alcoholism.

The American public should be outraged by this inhumane and fraudulent use of animal life. For this reason, IDA has created the “Outragies Awards”, to highlight the bogus use of animals in cruel, repetitive and wasteful research.

Awarded to the “Top Ten Most Outrageous Animal Experiments,” the Outragies, based on publications released in 2012, highlight stupid, cruel and truly outrageous research, like tormenting baby rats to study “child abuse”, giving hallucinogenic drugs to monkeys to create an animal model of schizophrenia, and hanging mice upside down by their tails to study depression.

There are hundreds of animal experiments that are outrageous and these Top Ten simply exemplify some of the worst. These experiments show that your tax dollars and animals’ lives are unjustifiably wasted on research that adds nothing to medical progress and does not promote human health.

You can read IDA’s full list here. Among this year’s awardees are:

The Most Outrageously Heartless award went to experimenters at New York University (NYU) who abused tiny newborn rats, exposing them to Abu Ghraib-like conditions, professing to study “child abuse.”

The Most Outrageously Superfluous award went to researchers at Yale and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) who gave massive doses of PCP to monkeys, claiming this made them “schizophrenic,” and then gave them a drug already known to treat schizophrenia in humans.

The Most Outrageously Depraved winner went to scientists at Columbia University who used costly genetic engineering to wipe out the sense of smell in mice, and then electro-shocked them and hung them upside-down by their tails with adhesive tape, claiming to study the effect of smell on anxiety.

Click here to sent a fax to your U.S. Senators and Representative right now! Then call them also – you can reach any Senator or Representative through the U.S. Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121.

against pseudoscience,
united we stand.
until it is eradicated
across this land!!!!

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

PETA

BACKGROUND

For decades, the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW) has allowed experimenters to conduct cruel taxpayer-funded “sound localization” experiments on cats like Double Trouble, a gentle orange tabby. In these experiments, cats have steel coils implanted in their eyes, holes drilled into their skulls, and electrodes implanted in their brains. Sometimes, they even have their ears cut off or are intentionally deafened by having a toxic chemical applied to their inner ear. They are then deprived of food for several days in order to coerce them to look in the direction of sounds during experimental sessions in which their heads are immobilized by a bolt screwed to their skulls.

More than 200,000 people have already contacted the federal government to ask that funding for these experiments be halted.

But UW also shares responsibility for approving and allowing this horrific abuse. Please use the form below to contact the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents. Urge the board members to use their authority to halt these cruel experiments immediately.


ADDITIONAL BACKGROUND

This morning (2/7), Academy Award nominee and longtime PETA activist James Cromwell was arrested after he burst into a UW Board of Regents meeting to demand that university leadership take action to stop cats like Double Trouble from having holes drilled into their skulls, being deafened with toxic chemicals, having steel coils implanted in their eyes, and being killed and decapitated.

Campus police arrested James and his fellow protester but not before the board sat stunned and listened as Cromwell shouted, “This is not science! This is cruel! Shame on you!” and held up graphic blown-up photos of Double Trouble, one of the many cats who has been tormented and killed in UW-Madison’s disturbing brain experiments that we first exposed last year.


WHOM TO CONTACT

jbbartell@aol.com ; jbehling@wrpr.com ; mbradley@ruderware.com ; jrdrew29@gmail.com ; anthony.evers@dpi.wi.gov ; mjfalbo2@gmail.com ; thiggins@uwalumni.com ; tracyhribar.regent@gmail.com ; em@rgmlawec.com ; rmmillner@uwalumni.com ; katherinepointer@gmail.com ; cpruitt@abdata.com ; garyr328@aol.com ; brent@johnsflaherty.com ; markt@oemfab.com ; vasquez.josef@gmail.com ; dwalsh@foley.com ; gwhitburn@aol.com ; anottestad@uwsa.edu ; jradue@uwsa.edu ; jlathrop@uwsa.edu ; mrice@uwsa.edu ; board@uwsa.edu ; kreilly@uwsa.edu ; chancellor@news.wisc.edu


SAMPLE LETTER | SOURCE PETA, CHANTAL BUSLOT

To Whom It Concerns,

It was with horror and revulsion that I read of the grisly experiments carried out at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on a continual basis, during which you subject innocent cats to the most excruciatingly painful ‘sound localization’ experiments. The cats have steel coils implanted in their eyes, holes drilled into their skulls, and electrodes implanted in their brains. Sometimes they have their ears cut off or are intentionally deafened by the application of a toxic chemical to their inner ear. They are then deprived of food for days untill hunger forces them to look in the direction of certain sounds, while their heads are immobilized by a bolt screwed to their skulls.

If this kind of torture was inflicted on cats by ordinary people they would be publicly shamed, prosecuted for animal cruelty, fined, and imprisoned. You are doing the very same thing under the guise of ‘science’ which in no way is any kind of justification.

You who promote and/or carry out these disgusting experiments deserve to be prosecuted, fined, and jailed for what you are doing, but you are allowed to hide behind your so-called scientific purposes. You should be ashamed. You are truly a disgrace to the human race, no matter what your qualifications are. You should be teaching kindness and compassion, not deliberately inflicting pain and torturing innocent creatures.

I am so very proud of James Cromwell for being brave enough to take a stand, and forcing you to confront what you are doing, allowing, and condoning.

I can only hope it has served to jolt you into a state of awareness, and that you will see the terrible error of your ways, and immediately put measures in place to ensure that these dreadful experiments are stopped forever.

Thank you for taking the time to read this urgent appeal.

NAME

we are cats
and we ask of you,
why do you the
cruel things to us
that you do.
drilling holes in our
heads,
destroying our ears.
we cry out in pain
and this you can
hear.
so someone out there,
help us now,
follow james cromwell’s
lead
and save us save us
somehow.
signed,
the feline residents of wisconsin-madison torture chambers!

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

Wikimedia Commons

Please click HERE to sign petition

Background | Source PCRM

Medical training at UMC involves cutting into live, anesthetized pigs and performing cardiovascular procedures. Students place catheters in the veins of the pigs, block the animals’ arteries, and inject them with drugs. Students then open the pigs’ chest cavities and manipulate the hearts. After the training, the animals are killed.

Ninety-eight percent of U.S. and Canadian medical schools exclusively use nonanimal education methods. UMC currently operates a simulation center and could immediately replace its use of animals immediately.

Please take a minute to ask University of Mississippi Medical Center School of Medicine dean James E. Keeton, M.D., and University of Mississippi chancellor Daniel W. Jones, M.D., to stop the use of live pigs in the school’s medical student physiology lab. We have provided text for you, but if you decide to write your own message, please be polite and encouraging. Here are some talking points:

1. Please replace the use of animals in UMMC’s physiology lab.
2. Anatomical and physiological differences between pigs and humans render this type of training suboptimal.
3. UMMC is one of only seven schools in the United States and Canada that still use live animals for training.
4. High-fidelity human-patient simulators more accurately represent human anatomy and allow for repetitive training.
5. UMMC already has a state-of-the-art simulation center than can easily provide nonanimal training methods.

pigs are pigs,
but man is
the swine.
and his treatment
of other beings,
is cruel and
way out of line!!!!!

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

1. Background | Source IDA

The firefighters’ oath of protecting lives doesn’t mean anything in Orleans County, New York as their fire department is gearing up for a “squirrel shoot ‘em up” event on February 16!

The fire department in Holley, New York is sponsoring the seventh annual “Squirrel Slam,” an annual event organized for the mass killing of squirrels, with prizes given to the individuals who kill the largest and heaviest of the animals, often the pregnant females.

This year, the squirrel killing contest has a “youth” category for children 14 years and under, and is offering big cash prizes for kids and adults.

While grey and red squirrels are the primary victims of these appalling killing contests, the children are also victims. Encouraging kids to kill animals for fun teaches them that animals do not have any value other than serving as targets; that one can make money from blasting away defenseless animals; and that killing and suffering inflicted on animals is not only acceptable but is encouraged.

There is no telling how many squirrels will be killed at this event but is certain that many of these little animals will be wounded, some of them left to crawl away to suffer and die slowly. Females will likely be pregnant, and some may well have recently given birth, only to be killed and leave their young alone to starve to death.

Update

Dear compassionate friends,

As you all know the petition was delivered to Mayor and we have records that it was received at 9:36am on Feb 11 2013. The Mayor of the city of Holley received the petition and letter from Hand4Paws and Julie Gallagher. Sadly, the hunt did happen and although concerned citizens from Friends of Animals were there to protest. Fellow Animal Rights Activist Joy Benson has started a new Facebook page that targets all animal killing contests through out the USA. This needs immediate action and it needs the implication of all us in order to have these hunts end once and for all.

Please join the FB event LEGISLATIVE CAMPAIGN TO BAN ANIMAL-KILLING CONTESTS https://www.facebook.com/events/142406042592499/146421438857626/?notif_t=plan_mall_activity#.US1VJNSsktA.twitter&utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

The following are links of news articles that covered the squirrel slam event. These sites were found and kept track by our friend Joy Benson and friends.

We want to thank all the people involved in these campaign and we would like to say to them that people involved in being active for animals inspire us all. We started only a petition…but because of the love you all have for animals you made this cruel event make the news nation wide. Thank you for giving your voice to animals. Never give up!

Washington Post – http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/ny-fire-dept-sponsored-squirrel-killing-contest-criticized-by-lawmaker-animal-rights-groups/2013/02/15/3a30f7b4-77ba-11e2-b102-948929030e64_story.html?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

ABC 17 News – http://www.abc17news.com/?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

FIREHOUSE – http://www.firehouse.com/news/10880603/ny-fire-depts-fundraising-squirrel-kill-has-critics?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

Telegraph.com – Worcester, MA – http://brooklyn.news12.com/news/ny-fire-dept-s-squirrel-kill-draws-complaints-1.4655247?firstfree=yes&utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

Brooklyn News 12 – http://brooklyn.news12.com/news/ny-fire-dept-s-squirrel-kill-draws-complaints-1.4655247?firstfree=yes&utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

Daily Herald, IL – http://www.dailyherald.com/article/20130215/news/702159709/?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

PostBulleton.com – http://www.postbulletin.com/news/nation/ny-fire-dept-s-squirrel-kill-drawing-complaints/article_23ae8df7-111b-58b6-a736-043af272cf98.html?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

ABC 17 / Columbia, MO – http://www.abc17news.com/?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

GlobeGazette. com – http://globegazette.com/news/national/ny-fire-dept-s-squirrel-kill-drawing-complaints/article_0347f994-4a72-5cf3-ad8c-e154c6520470.html?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

NBC TV Tucson – http://www.kvoa.com/news/ny-fire-dept-s-squirrel-kill-drawing-complaints/?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

KATU.COM / Portland News – http://www.katu.com/news/national/NYFDs-squirrel-shooting-contest-draws-ire—-191460701.html?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

Finger Lakes Times – http://www.fltimes.com/news/state/article_257800d5-683d-5014-86ca-1c8331318856.html?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

Billings, Montana Gazette – http://billingsgazette.com/news/national/ny-fire-dept-s-squirrel-kill-drawing-complaints/article_57645605-4527-5f1a-b40f-f2e78ddff64e.html?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

Galveston Daily News – http://www.galvestondailynews.com/news_ap/nation/article_c04f64d4-c9d7-549e-9404-4c5290d84d9f.html?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

Long Island News – http://www.newsday.com/news/region-state/ny-fire-dept-s-squirrel-kill-draws-complaints-1.4655246?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

Bryan / College Station – The Eagle – http://www.theeagle.com/news/nation/article_0c7883b3-3fd2-5c3f-9bf7-2b823c8aa920.html?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

Wisconson News – http://www.wiscnews.com/news/article_9c24c70b-5cb6-5983-abb4-9d87902a86b4.html?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

The Republic, Columbus, IN – http://www.therepublic.com/view/story/e37cc1aef6794a23bf12b59f57861db5/US–Squirrel-Killing-Contest?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

Huffington Post – http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20130215/us-squirrel-killing-contest/?utm_hp_ref=green&ir=green&utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

Breitbart News – http://www.breitbart.com/system/wire/DA4FBP600?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

Houston Chronicle – http://www.chron.com/news/us/article/NY-fire-dept-s-squirrel-kill-draws-complaints-4282355.php?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

Star Telegram, Fort Worth, TX – http://www.star-telegram.com/2013/02/15/4624499/ny-fire-depts-squirrel-kill-drawing.html?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

Long Island Firearms – http://www.longislandfirearms.com/forum/topic/62485-anti-squirrel-slam/?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

Ithica Journal.com – http://www.theithacajournal.com/article/20130215/NEWS10/302150063/Rochester-area-fire-dept-s-squirrel-kill-drawing-complaints?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

CharlotteObserver.com – http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/02/15/3858054/ny-fire-depts-squirrel-kill-drawing.html?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

Eyewitness 4 KOB – NM – http://www.kob.com/article/stories/S2933743.shtml?cat=600&utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

StarGazette.com – http://www.stargazette.com/article/20130215/NEWS10/302150063/Rochester-area-fire-dept-s-squirrel-kill-drawing-complaints?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

Anchorage Daily News – http://www.adn.com/2013/02/15/2791119/ny-fire-depts-squirrel-kill-drawing.html?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

The Telegraph, River Bend – http://www.pressconnects.com/article/20130215/NEWS10/302150063/Rochester-area-fire-dept-s-squirrel-kill-drawing-complaints?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

PressConnects.com – http://www.pressconnects.com/article/20130215/NEWS10/302150063/Rochester-area-fire-dept-s-squirrel-kill-drawing-complaints?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

Clarion Ledger – http://www.clarionledger.com/viewart/20130215/NEWS03/130215034/Squirrel-shooting-contest-comes-under-fire?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

Aspen Times – http://www.aspentimes.com/article/20130215/APA/1302150905?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

St. Louis – http://www.stltoday.com/news/national/ny-fire-dept-s-squirrel-kill-draws-complaints/article_7d103a7b-db48-5666-972a-dbbd4a0abfd9.html?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

The Republican, MA – http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2013/02/squirrel-shooting_contest_spon.html?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

The Garden Island, NJ – http://thegardenisland.com/news/national/ny-fire-dept-s-squirrel-kill-draws-complaints/article_c2aa2091-8584-574b-b31b-c20b382ae762.html?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

WPTZ, NY – http://www.wptz.com/news/vermont-new-york/plattsburgh/New-York-Squirrel-Shooting-Contest-Planned/-/9277622/18572436/-/n9hh4g/-/index.html?absolute=true&utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

GettysburgTimes.com – http://www.wptz.com/news/vermont-new-york/plattsburgh/New-York-Squirrel-Shooting-Contest-Planned/-/9277622/18572436/-/n9hh4g/-/index.html?absolute=true&utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

UT – San Diego – http://web.utsandiego.com/news/national-news/?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

El Paso, Inc – http://www.elpasoinc.com/news/wire/regional_us/article_a86fb1c7-ab81-5459-8d87-8b05c2b1e440.html?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

Boston.com – http://www.boston.com/news/nation/2013/02/15/fire-dept-squirrel-kill-drawing-complaints/xh0PJzP67pR60402YYfSQI/story.html?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

Seattle Times – http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2020368882_apussquirrelkillingcontest.html?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

The Evening Sun, Hanover, PA – http://www.eveningsun.com/nationworldnews/ci_22599999/ny-fire-dept-s-squirrel-kill-drawing-complaints?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

Contra Coasta Times – http://www.contracostatimes.com/nation-world/ci_22599999/ny-fire-dept-s-squirrel-kill-drawing-complaints?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

Miami Herald – http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/02/15/3236920/ny-fire-depts-squirrel-kill-drawing.html?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

Marin Independent Journal – http://www.marinij.com/tablehome/ci_22599999/ny-fire-dept-s-squirrel-kill-drawing-complaints?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

CharlotteObserver.com – http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/02/15/3858054/ny-fire-depts-squirrel-kill-drawing.html?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

The Witchita Eagle, Wichita, KA – http://www.kansas.com/2013/02/15/2678132/ny-fire-depts-squirrel-kill-drawing.html?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

Raleigh, Durham, Charlotte – WRAL.COM – http://www.wral.com/ny-fire-dept-s-squirrel-kill-drawing-complaints/12114320/?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

the Washington Post – http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/ny-fire-dept-sponsored-squirrel-killing-contest-criticized-by-lawmaker-animal-rights-groups/2013/02/15/3a30f7b4-77ba-11e2-b102-948929030e64_story.html?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

Huffington Post – http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20130215/us-squirrel-killing-contest/?utm_hp_ref=green&ir=green&utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

Miami Herald – http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/02/15/3236920/ny-fire-depts-squirrel-kill-drawing.html?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

NBC NEWS.COM – Plattsberg, NY – http://www.nbcnews.com/id/50828396/ns/local_news-plattsburgh_ny/#.UR7yXqWsiSo?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

KLEW TV.COM – http://www.klewtv.com/news/national/NYFDs-squirrel-shooting-contest-draws-ire—-191460701.html?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

MyFox Detroit.com – http://www.myfoxdetroit.com/story/21221777/upstate-ny-fire-department-hosting-squirrel-hunt?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

The Times, New Jersey – http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2013/02/squirrel_shooting_contest_come.html?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

CTPOST.COM – http://www.ctpost.com/news/us/article/NY-fire-dept-s-squirrel-kill-drawing-complaints-4282355.php?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

MyNorthwest.com – http://mynorthwest.com/?nid=15&sid=2203839&utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

KSTC45 Minneapolis, St. Paul, MN – http://www.kstc45.com/article/stories/S2933764.shtml?cat=11584&utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

WIVB4 – http://www.wivb.com/dpp/news/nation/NY-fire-depts-squirrel-kill-drawing-complaints_07355505?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

My SanAntonio.com – http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/us/article/NY-fire-dept-s-squirrel-kill-drawing-complaints-4282355.php?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

Yahoo!News – http://news.yahoo.com/ny-fire-dept-squirrel-kill-drawing-complaints-215141159.html?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

Philly.com – http://mobile.philly.com/news/?wss=/philly/wires&id=191459791&utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

Roadrunner – http://www.rr.com/news/topic/article/rr/1110/81584437/NY_fire_depts_squirrel_kill_drawing_complaints?utm_source=supporter_message&utm_medium=email

MyFoxNY.com – http://www.myfoxny.com/story/21221777/upstate-ny-fire-department-hosting-squirrel-hunt

FOX10 TV.com – http://www.fox10tv.com/dpp/news/national/NY-fire-depts-squirrel-kill-drawing-complaints_68150598

13 NEWS – http://www.cfnews13.com/content/news/cfnews13/news/article.html/content/news/articles/ap/2013/02/15/NY_fire_dept_s_squirrel_kill_drawing_complaints.html

MERCED SUN-STAR – http://www.vcstar.com/news/2013/feb/15/ny-fire-depts-squirrel-kill-drawing-complaints/

Ventura County Star – http://www.vcstar.com/news/2013/feb/15/ny-fire-depts-squirrel-kill-drawing-complaints/

I4U News NY State – http://www.i4u.com/2013/02/new-york-state/drawing-squirrel-ny-complaints-kill-fire-depts

Las Vegas Sun – http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2013/feb/15/us-squirrel-killing-contest/

This message is from Hand4Paws who started the petition “Mayor John W. Kenney, Jr: Please Stop the Hazzard County Squirrel Slam ,” which you signed on Change.org.

View the petition  |  View and reply to this message online

2. Background | Source IDA

In January, 2013, a National Institutes of Health (NIH)-appointed panel of experts unanimously recommended steps that would lead to the retirement of most government-held chimpanzees from laboratories to sanctuaries. While not a complete ban on chimpanzee research, it is an enormous step forward and represents a stunningly positive shift in philosophy for the NIH.

Chimps at IDA Africa

credit: Jacques Gillon, IDA Africa

We’ve never been this close to getting chimpanzees out of labs and we can’t ease up now. But we want them ALL retired. No Chimp Left Behind!

The “Report from Council of Councils Working Group on Use of Chimpanzees in NIH-Supported Research” recommended that almost all of the 451 chimpanzees “owned” or supported by the NIH who are now at research facilities should be permanently retired from research and moved to sanctuaries. This is great news!

However, the panel called for holding on to 50 chimpanzees – denying them the freedom the experts admit is ethically required – just to keep them available for experiments in the future. This is not acceptable, and goes against the growing scientific consensus that chimpanzee research simply is not necessary. And the panel failed to advocate for freeing the estimated 350 chimpanzees who are imprisoned and tortured in privately-operated laboratories.

too many innocent animals
get a rotten deal,
please sign and share
each second appeal.
and if that is not enough,
do sign some more,
until animal cruelty
is out the door!!!!

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

Wikimedia Commons

BACKGROUND | SOURCE FORCE CHANGE

Revlon has long been considered a cruelty-free company. However, in recent years Revlon has opened up cosmetic manufacturing in China, where animal testing is compulsory. When asked whether the company is testing on animals in China, Revlon representatives responded by saying, “Revlon is in full compliance with all applicable laws and regulations related to animal testing.” This arbitrary statement has led consumers to believe that Revlon is hiding the fact that it now tests on animals.

PETA has recently withdrawn its endorsement of Revlon as a cruelty-free company, now claiming that the company does indeed test on animals. PETA also recently bought a large share of Revlon’s stock so that they could determine once and for all whether Revlon is abusing animals for the sake of beauty.

An independent manufacturer who sells ingredients to Revlon to make cosmetics also reported that Revlon recently ordered tests on 50 animals. These tests involve injecting rabbits or mice over and over again until the subjects die in order to determine at what concentration the product is lethal.

Animal testing is an outdated practice that is no longer necessary to ensure the safety of cosmetics. Alternative methods, such as using human cells, are readily available and equally effective. There is no reason in this modern world that animals need to be tortured for the sake of beauty products. Further, Revlon needs to come clean to its consumers about animal testing once and for all. Please ask Revlon to admit to animal testing and to stop abusing animals.


PETITIONS

1. Please click and sign HERE via PETA
2. Please click and sign HERE via Force Change
3.Please visit HERE to like Animal Spirits


ADDITIONAL ACTION CONTACT

Please click HERE for online contact form


SAMPLE COMMENT

I am shocked to learn that REVLON discontinued its non-animal-testing protocol, and continues to support animal experimentation via its Chinese market. As such, as long as REVLON continues to unnecessarily capitalize on the mutilation, torture, and death of animals, I will not financially support you.

Please make both the ethical and financially-responsible decision to discontinue animal experimentation immediately: join an increasing body of corporations who are listening to a concerned and attentive consumer population who refuse to be complicit in animal experimentation.

revlon, in the name
of beauty you torture
and maim.
is this to be your
claim to fame?

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

Wikimedia Commons

BACKGROUND | SOURCE FOR LIFE & FACEBOOK

Washington University conducts a class called Pediatric Advanced Life Support (PALS) that includes practicing intubation on live cats.

Intubating requires students to forcibly insert tubes into cats’ throats. This can cause bleeding, swelling, cracked teeth, punctured lungs, and even death.

The American Heart Association states that it does not condone the use of animals in its PALS course.

Instead, training should be done on lifelike human simulator manikins. Wash U’s PALS students have access to a state-of-the-art pediatric simulation lab on the campus of St. Louis Children’s Hospital.

97% of U.S. medical institutions offering PALS training do not use live animals.

Your voice counts for these cats. Take action immediately.

Tell Washington University to stop using live animals for unjustifiable practices.

WHOM TO CONTACT

Email block:

kennedy@kids.wustl.edu ; mgp6225@bjc.org ; jaffe@kids.wustl.edu ; gunn_j@kids.wustl.edu ; shapirol@wustl.edu ; wrighton@wustl.edu

Individual:

Robert “Bo” Kennedy, PALS Director
kennedy@kids.wustl.edu
314-454-2341

Marcia Putnam, PALS Administrator
mgp6225@bjc.org
314-454-2229

David Jaffe, PALS Instructor
jaffe@kids.wustl.edu
314-454-2341

Joseph Gunn, PALS Instructor
gunn_j@kids.wustl.edu
314-454-2341

Larry Shapiro, Dean of WUSTL School of Medicine
shapirol@wustl.edu
314-362-6827

Mark Wrighton, Chancellor of WUSTL
wrighton@wustl.edu
314-935-5100

Telephone:

314-454-2341, 314-454-2229

SAMPLE LETTER

Dear Administrator Putman, Director Kennedy, PALS Instructor Jaffe, PALS Instructor Gunn, Dean Shapiro, and Chancellor Wrighton:

I am disturbed after discovering that Washington University in St. Louis still uses cats and ferrets to teach students how to intubate babies; these animals are subjected to mutilating experiments and killed, a practice that inflicts immense suffering upon them. These animals are marvelously intelligent and sentient beings, capable of thought, love, pain, and fear, and to expose them to this archaic method of training is alarming. In a recently-conducted survey, it has been determined that in greater than 95% of similar programs, the TraumaMan System has been utilized (PCRM). The TraumaMan System has been proven a superior model to the live animal “model”, and I fear any student not trained on the most advanced method will have a diminished learning experience. This should be concerning to any potential patient.

Additionally, since animals cannot be substituted for human beings, subjecting them to this exploitive process reflects a blatant disregard for life; how can we teach our future medical professionals ethics while enforcing a course that maims and kills live, sentient beings? This represents a conflict of interest as well as a contradiction in both morals and actions: if non-human animals are deemed similar enough to humans physiologically, then you must acknowledge that, as sentient beings, they should not be exploited and killed either. Any other conclusion would be considered a discord and would serve as a detriment to the learning process, especially in such a critical field of study.

It would be regrettable not being able to recommend your fine institution; however, because I value the most sophisticated and innovative learning techniques, it would be remiss of me to consider Washington University based on your reliance of such an obsolete method of study. As such, I respectfully ask that you please accept the superior method of study, the TraumaMan System, for your university and students, and make yours an institution of credibility and honor.

I know that your time is limited, and I want to thank you for your attention and consideration to this urgent appeal.

NAME

i cannot breathe,
i cannot swallow.
whose evil instructions
did you follow.
i am just an innocent cat.
i do not think you humans
would want to go
through that!
please use manikins,
be humane.
no being should ever
go through this pain!!!

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

Wikimedia Commons

BACKGROUND | SOURCE FACEBOOK

This is an urgent call to action on behalf of the international campaign to Free the AstraZeneca Beagles. Win Animal Rights is calling for international solidarity and we are asking for animal rights groups across the USA and around the world to get behind the international effort to liberate hundreds of beagles used in laboratory testing by AstraZeneca.

Actions for Groups and Organizers:

Start organizing protests and events at local AstraZeneca offices. Locations can be found here:

http://www.astrazeneca.com/About-Us/Worldwide-locations

USA AstraZeneca Leadership Team:

http://www.astrazeneca-us.com/about-us/us-leadership-team

Call as often as you can
Write Letters – snail mail, email
Tweet

Take pictures of your dogs and other companion animals asking that the AstraZeneca beagles be set free.

Send your pictures and letters to:

kontakt@astrazeneca.com
IR@astrazeneca.com

Make sure you copy WAR as we will be delivering pictures in person to AstraZeneca’s USA Headquarters.

winanimalrights@optonline.net

And also send a copy to the international campaign coordinators:

info@djurrattsalliansens.se

Coming soon:

Protest at AstraZeneca USA Headquarters in Delaware
Protest at AstraZeneca’s NYC Investor Office

Details soon.

If you have any questions or if you want to help on this important campaign please contact us at:

winanimalrights@optonline.net

or message us on Facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/WinAnimalRights


WHOM TO CONTACT

Email

kontakt@astrazeneca.com ; IR@astrazeneca.com

Phone

If you are in the United States and would like additional information regarding AstraZeneca products, or you are a third party with an offer of services for AstraZeneca, you can contact the AstraZeneca Information Center by phone at 1-800-236-9933 (Monday – Friday 8 a.m. – 6 p.m. ET, excluding holidays).

Online

Contact AZ online HERE


SAMPLE LETTER

To Whom It Concerns,

This is an urgent call to AstraZeneca to free the AstraZeneca vivisected beagles, and any other animals suffering under the guise of medical advancement.

From a pragmatic standpoint, if we could adequately determine the effects of drugs using animals in general then human trials would be unnecessary, a costly redundancy of testing protocols. Therefore, if we acknowledge that data from animal testing cannot be extrapolated to humans, as demonstrated by the need for human testing trials prior to a general administration of drugs, then why are animals used at all? To determine a general idea relative to safety of them? If animals cannot be used to predict a human outcome in general, then how can they be used to predict safety? It’s a ridiculous premise, one on which vivisectors place the lives of human animals and the death of non-human animals with a publicity machine using deceptive statements and misleading assertions fabricated by unscrupulous “scientists” to garner social approval.

Animal experimentation is unnecessary, unjustified, and unprincipled, its only function to financially benefit those who exploit animals. Animals have rights to live free from pain and suffering regardless of objections to acknowledge such; I therefore hope this message finds you willing to examine and subsequently change your potential complicity in their abuse and death.

Thank you for your attention and consideration to this urgent appeal.

NAME

we stand in defiance,
against pseudoscience.
let those sweet beagles be,
and let them live free!!!!

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

1. Source IDA

Please sign this petition asking Colorado officials to fire and prosecute officers Sam Carter and Brent Curnow for the death of the elk known as Big Boy.

On January 1, the beloved male elk who had been frequenting the Mapleton Hill area of Boulder, Colorado was shot dead by on-duty police officer Sam Carter. Officer Carter posed with the dead body shortly after killing Big Boy, a name given to the elk by residents of the area. He then called fellow officer Brent Curnow, who was off-duty, to come and collect the animal for butchering.

Both officers failed to report the incident to their dispatch or supervisors at the Boulder Police Department. They also didn’t report the incident to Colorado Division of Parks and Wildlife, which is also required.

Officer Carter has given conflicting accounts of why he shot Big Boy. He first told investigators that Big Boy appeared injured and that he was putting him out of his misery. He also told investigators that Big Boy was aggressive and that’s why he fired. Both of these stories have been contradicted by neighbors who saw Big Boy on an almost daily basis, including those who saw Big Boy just hours before he was killed.

Officer Carter acted recklessly, needlessly firing a shotgun in a heavily populated residential area. And not reporting the incident is a violation of the law he is sworn to uphold. Click here to sign the petition!

At the least Big Boy’s killing violates Samson’s Law, which was passed after a similar incident in 1998 where a poacher killed another beloved neighborhood elk. Samson’s Law is meant to protect animals from unscrupulous hunters. Animals protected under this law are those with six-point antlers or larger. Anyone caught killing one of these protected animals faces a fine up to $10,000 and other criminal penalties.

Officers Carter and Curnow should be fired by the Boulder Police Department and charged in the reckless killing of Big Boy.

2. Source PETA2

Bears Trapped in Pits, Forced to Beg For Food …

In 2012, PETA conducted an undercover investigation at Chief Saunooke Bear Park (CSBP), a roadside collection of bear pits in Cherokee, North Carolina. CSBP confines bears to desolate concrete cells, where they are forced to beg for food and are deprived of all that is natural and important to them.

PETA’s investigator found that the bored and frustrated bears turn endlessly in circles. One of them routinely rocks back and forth—a sign of profound deprivation and stress. They bite the pits’ metal bars, which breaks their teeth. This is painful and can cause bone infections, so it requires veterinary care, but PETA’s investigator never saw a veterinarian at CSBP and never saw the bears given any pain relief.

PETA’s investigator also found cruelty:

Workers sometimes leave the bears, who have a remarkably well-developed sense of smell, trapped amid their own waste all day long.

Instead of removing feces, they spray a citrus-scented product into the pits. One worker told PETA’s investigator, “You just got to be careful because [federal officials] think you’re trying to hide something. Which we are.”

CSBP’s manager and bear handler admitted that workers deny bears food because, “[i]f you feed them … they ain’t gonna eat for people.”

The manager boasted that he sprays water at one bear “all the time … to get his ass up” and force him onto display.

The park’s bear handler said it took “20 shots … in the head” to kill one of CSBP’s bears. He said that there is “[n]othing better than a bear that’s been eating bread and apples all its life. Meat’s good.”


3. Source PETA

Musician Dave Navarro is known for his body art, guitar shredding, and iconic rocker look. His intense rocker style includes an array of beauty products that help give him his dark edge, but some makeup was too dark for even him. When Dave discovered that some companies perform cruel experiments on animals in order to test their products, the only choice was to go cruelty-free.





Around the world, rats, mice, guinea pigs, rabbits, and other animals are force-fed products or endure the pain of having chemicals applied to their sensitive eyes and skin for product tests––even though the results of animal tests are unreliable and not applicable to humans. These cruel tests are not required by law in the U.S., and they’ve been banned in the European Union and Israel. Cruelty-free products are manufactured by companies that refuse to poison and kill animals in crude product tests. In his ad with PETA, Dave is putting himself in the shoes of the animals who live a painful life and suffer an agonizing death for these archaic experiments.

‘I Defy Anyone to Watch This Stuff and Explain Why It’s OK.’ Dave takes us behind the scenes at his edgy photo shoot with PETA, urging everyone to help stop product testing on animals by choosing to purchase only cruelty-free products. The best way to stop companies from using animals is to refuse to purchase their products and to let them know that you won’t buy their products as long as they support tests on animals.

Start the new year off with a pledge to go cruelty-free, and check out PETA’s lists of companies that do and that don’t test on animals in order to make your search for cruelty-free products as easy as vegan pie! Order a free copy of PETA’s first-ever global cruelty-free shopping guide, then take it with you on your next shopping trip and share it with friends. All companies that are included on PETA’s cruelty-free list have signed PETA’s statement of assurance or provided a statement verifying that neither they nor their ingredients suppliers conduct, commission, or pay for any animal tests on ingredients, formulations, or finished products anywhere in the world.


4. Source Born Free

Please click HERE to list comment

Sample Comment

As a supporter of Born Free USA and a lover of wildlife, I implore you to list the African lion as “endangered” under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. This magnificent species is under attack from many directions, including habitat loss, retaliatory killings and disease.

But possibly the biggest major threat to lions comes from the United States, which is — by far — the world’s largest importer of lions and lion parts. By listing them as endangered, we will assume a leading role in lion protection, and no doubt will inspire other countries to at least pay attention and probably follow our good example.

In the past quarter-century, African lions’ population has been more than cut in half. It now is estimated that fewer than 35,000 live in the wild today, and if those numbers drop much more, the species survival across its range will be in grave doubt.

Please list the African lion as “endangered” under the United States Endangered Species Act. Thank you for your consideration, and for doing the right thing for lions.

Background

The latest estimates are that fewer than 35,000 lions now exist in the wild in Africa, about a 50 percent drop in just a quarter-century. You can do something to stop that alarming decline.

Please contact the Fish and Wildlife Service in support of our petition to list the African lion as “endangered” under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.

In November, the U.S. government declared the petition — submitted in March 2011 by Born Free USA and a coalition of other animal protection groups — may be warranted, and began soliciting comments for 60 days. That comment period ends at 11:59 p.m. EST on Monday, Jan. 28.

Shrinking habitat (one-fifth of what it once was), loss of prey and retaliatory killings by humans have decimated the African lion population. But one of the biggest challenges to the species’ survival may come from the United States, the world’s largest importer of lion trophies and lion parts. (Learn more about lions’ plight here.)

That is why listing the African lion as “endangered” is so crucial.

each day we are blessed,
so we do what we can,
to improve or world
for animals
and man☺♥☻

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

Wikimedia Commons

Written by Michelle Kretzer

Companies that test their products on animals needn’t bother trying to ship them to Israel, because, starting New Year’s Day, the country banned the import, sale, and marketing of animal-tested cosmetics, toiletries, and household cleaners. Previously, in 2007, the Israeli government had banned using animals to test personal-care and household products within the country. But with the new law, which was passed in 2010 and came into effect January 1, 2013, lawmakers have one-upped themselves, blocking products that have been tested on animals in other countries from even crossing Israel’s border.

PETA and our affiliates are working to end the testing of cosmetics and household products on animals in countries around the world, and Israel has proved that a full ban on such vile products is not only possible but also ethically responsible. The EU had passed a similar ban, which was also scheduled to take effect in 2013, but lawmakers are now considering extending that deadline. PETA and PETA U.K. have been pushing hard to get the EU to uphold the original end date. In addition, PETA India is trying to get a similar ban implemented in that country, and the effort has a lot of momentum. PETA and PETA Asia have been helping Chinese scientists switch to in vitro cosmetics testing methods and are encouraging the Chinese government to accept the results in place of the animal tests that it currently requires. And in the U.S., PETA has been purchasing stock in companies that conduct animal tests so that we can propose shareholder resolutions to switch to humane testing methods.

But despite all the legal hullabaloo, we can at least designate our homes cruelty-free areas. It’s easy to select personal-care and household products that weren’t tested on animals by glancing at PETA’s new global Cruelty-Free Shopping Guide, the latest complete list of companies that refuse to conduct or pay for any animal tests anywhere in the world.

Israeli monkey-breeding farm “mazor” to close | Y Net News

Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein decided Saturday to back an initiative by Environmental Protection Minister Gilad Erdan to ban the import and export of monkeys to Mazor Farm (BFC) and limit its activities to medical research in Israel only.

Erdan welcomed the decision, saying: “Banning the trade of monkeys bolsters animal rights and sends a very clear message: Trading animals for profit is wrong.”

Erdan’s initial move to limit BFC’s operations was met with legal hurdles, as the Environmental Protection Ministry’s own legal counsel expressed concern that the move may infringe on the freedom of occupation rights of businesses that trade animals.

Erdan than asked Weinstein to rule on the matter, focusing specifically on the export and import of monkeys by BFC. The minister said that the limitation will have to impact on research facilities in Israel.

“Closing Mazor Farm stems from moral, ethical and educational reasons – all of which are meant to minimize the harm and suffering of wild animals,” Erdan said in his brief.

“Israel should not be a center for monkey trade for other countries,” Erdan stressed, “Especially since the local demand in Israel is so low that it does not morally justify the existence of a farm whose main business is large-scale exports,” he added.

Still, while the AG ruled that the Erdan’s ministerial jurisdiction allows him to make extensive changes to the volume of animals trade for research purposes, there was no legal justification to bar such action altogether.

The ruling states that the import and export of monkeys for research purposes will be barred, and that BFC’s breeding operations must be limited to medical research in Israel only.

Weinstein ruled that the limitation on the export and import of monkeys will be applied gradually over the next tow years. “This two-year period takes into consideration the needs of research facilities in Israel, as well as those of Mazor Farm, to adjust to these changes,” he said.

The AG also ruled that the new regulations must be anchored by the proper legislation; and ordered the Environmental Protection Ministry to update the relevant international bodies of the changes, as required by various international research treaties Israel is a part of.

Israel’s animal rights group welcomed the decision, saying it was “Putting an end to one of the cruelest ways in which animals in Israel are treated. Mazor Farm has been a black stain on Israel’s society since the early 1990s.

“We will continue to pursue the issue for the two years until the ban takes effect, to stop the farm’s cruel and corrupt trade in monkeys.”

The decision, the statement added, “Sends a clear message to anyone who abuses animals for a living – the Israeli public will no longer tolerate cruel practices, only because a handful of people make their living off them, even if it’s out of the public eye. This is a happy day for anyone who has morals and scruples.”

Anabel Zamir, a leader of the animal rights campaign against the Mazor Farm, welcomed the ruling, but noted that “The attorney general is still allowing animal trade for profit, under the state’s sponsorship, for the next two years, without mandating proof that any such trade will be done for life-saving purposes. That’s very disturbing.”

BFC was unavailable for comment.

United Airlines Will Not Ship Primates to Labs! | Source PETA

Following a relentless PETA campaign, United Airlines has announced that it now prohibits the transportation of primates to laboratories for use in cruel and deadly experiments!

In 2011, when United announced its planned merger with Continental Airlines, PETA contacted United to ask whether the airline would maintain its compassionate ban on shipping primates to laboratories or allow the cruel practice, as Continental had. When officials refused to give a straight answer and then a United cargo representative confirmed in writing that the company was not prohibiting such shipments, PETA launched a public campaign urging the newly merged airline not to send monkeys to die in pain and misery in laboratories.

United received more than 130,000 e-mails from PETA supporters who took action through our website. Thousands of dedicated activists flooded United’s Facebook wall with messages and heartbreaking photos of primates locked in laboratories. And PETA organized demonstrations against the airline at its offices around the world, including at the company headquarters in Chicago. We also purchased stock in the company with the intention of introducing a shareholder resolution later this year.

United Airlines’ laudable decision not to ship primates to laboratories means that, with our recent Air Canada victory, not a single commercial North American airline is willing to do so, making it much more difficult for experimenters to get their hands on primates in order to separate them from their families and poison them, drill into them, addict them to drugs, and lock them in solitary confinement.

PETA will continue to pressure the few remaining major airlines that haven’t seen the light and followed United’s lead. This shrinking list includes only Air France, China Eastern Airlines, Philippine Airlines, and Vietnam Airlines. You can help animals by urging these airlines to stop this cruel practice.

Thank you for helping make this victory possible and for your compassion for animals everywhere!


HSI Commends Taiwan for Historic Ban on Trade in Marine Mammal Products

Humane Society International/Canada commends Taiwan for passing a landmark ban on trade in marine mammal products, including seal skins, but exempting products of traditional indigenous hunts. The Taiwanese Legislative Yuan passed the legislation with unanimous support following a multi-year campaign by Taiwanese animal protection group EAST in collaboration with HSI.

“The compassionate actions of the Taiwanese Legislative Yuan will save countless seals and other marine mammals from a horrible fate,” said Rebecca Aldworth, executive director of HSI Canada. “The momentum to end trade in marine mammal products is growing and the sealing industry’s days are numbered. Instead of providing more pointless subsidies to artificially prop up this shameful practice, Canada should prohibit the slaughter and invest in a transition program for sealers.”

“Citizens of Taiwan care deeply about animal welfare, and we do not want to trade in products of cruelty that the rest of the world has rejected,” said Wu Hung, executive director of EAST. “I am very proud of the leadership Taiwan has shown in banning trade in marine mammal products. I hope that many other nations will follow suit, and that the Canadian government will finally do as the majority of Canadians and people around the world want and end the seal hunt for good.”

“Between 2003 and 2009, Taiwan imported 430,000 kilograms of seal oil, which made us the 4th largest importer of seal oil in the world. Through our trade in seal products, consumers in Taiwan were unintentionally involved in the killing of thousands of innocent seals in Canada,” said Legislator Lin of the Legislative Yuan in Taiwan. “Taiwan’s decision is an important step forward for animal protection and conservation in Asia.” Canada’s commercial seal hunt is the largest slaughter of marine mammals on Earth. Because most Canadians oppose commercial sealing, the products of the seal slaughter are almost entirely exported. With the United States, European Union and Russia prohibiting trade in seal products, the Canadian sealing industry has sought to develop alternate markets in Asia, sparking protests in mainland China, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan.

EAST launched their campaign to secure a Taiwanese ban on seal product trade in 2010, achieving massive public support for the move and convincing many retailers in Taiwan to voluntarily discontinue sales of seal products. The prohibition on trade in marine mammal products cements Taiwan’s position and ensures that its trade in marine mammal products will never resume.

Facts:

• The United States, European Union, Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Mexico—and now Taiwan–have prohibited trade in some or all seal products.
• In January 2012, sealing industry representatives admitted that there are 400,000 seal skins in inventory on the global market.
• In April 2012, when it appeared the annual seal slaughter would not go ahead due to lack of markets, the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador announced that it would provide $3.6 million in loans to Carino Processing Limited to stockpile skins to meet “future demand.”
• At the industry’s height, sealing revenues amounted to about 3 percent of the landed value of Newfoundland’s fishing industry. In recent years, the landed value of the seal hunt has been in the region of $1 million annually, with only a few hundred fishermen participating in the slaughter.
• 2010 polling revealed half of Newfoundland sealers with an opinion support a sealing industry buyout—a plan in which sealers would receive immediate compensation as the hunt is ended and funds would be invested in economic alternatives in the communities involved.

Media Contact: Dean Pogas, 514.395.2914, dpogas@humanesociety.org

if such goodness were contagious,
it would be so wonderfully
outrageous!!!!

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

Wikimedia Commons

Source: VegNews
By: Elizabeth Castoria

The National Defense Authorization Act will stop the use of animals in military trainings.

The New Year brings good news for our four-legged friends. By signing the National Defense Authorization Act on January 2, President Obama has called for an end to the use of live animals in military training. Previously, the military used animals—usually pigs or goats—in combat-trauma training courses that involved injuring the animals (often amputating their limbs or shooting them) so that trainees could practice medical intervention on the victims, as they might an injured soldier on the battlefield. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has long lobbied to end the cruel practice, especially in light of the available human-based alternative methods, which will now be implemented.


Source: PETA

We’re starting 2013 off with a bang! President Obama has just signed into law a bill that includes language requiring the Department of Defense to create a strategy and timeline by March 1, 2013, for replacing the shooting, stabbing, and dismembering of animals in military training drills with human simulators and other modern non-animal methods.

This is a milestone moment in our ongoing campaign to stop the military from tormenting thousands of live animals each year in these archaic trauma exercises!

When this lifesaving provision was first inserted into the National Defense Authorization Act last year, PETA and its supporters sprang into action with e-mail and call-in campaigns to urge members of Congress to support the important measure. We now know that they took our concerns seriously and acted on them!

To bolster our efforts to urge the Department of Defense and Congress to address this vital issue, PETA released disturbing, never-before-seen undercover video footage this past year showing live goats who had their limbs broken and cut off with tree trimmers in a military training drill. A PETA complaint based on the video led to federal citations for animal welfare violations and prompted Congress to request an investigation into the contractor that conducted the cruel training. PETA also coauthored a study showing that three-quarters of the U.S.’s NATO allies do not use any animals in their military medical training programs, instead employing superior non-animal methods such as humanlike simulators.

Tens of thousands of PETA members and supporters—including high-profile military veterans Oliver Stone, Bob Barker, and Gideon Raff—have written to the Department of Defense asking the agency to modernize its training program by replacing its deadly animal laboratories with more effective, human-relevant simulation tools.

every inch forward me make,
one foot ahead of the other,
less lives “they” take
of our animal
brothers ☺♥☻

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

Wikimedia Commons

1. Please click HERE to send automatic fax

Background | Source IDA

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi claims to be “green” and a “sustainable living” supporter, while profiting from the sale of veal at four restaurants in which she is an investor. The veal industry is built on torture – systematically inflicting unimaginable suffering on over 62,000 innocent newborn calves per month, stripped away from their mothers hours after birth and placed in intensive confinement until they are slaughtered.

U.S. Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House Minority Leader, is an investor in the Moana Restaurant Group that serves veal in four of its restaurants, each called Piatti, in Mill Valley, California; La Jolla, California; Denver, Colorado; and San Antonio, Texas. As a public figure and leader who claims to be a proponent of green and sustainable living, she should know better than to endorse and profit from the unspeakable horrors and cruelty that newborn veal calves experience.

Please use the form HERE to tell Nancy Pelosi to enforce a No Veal policy at her restaurants today. Veal is NOT green, it’s bloody wrong!


2. Please click HERE to send automatic letter

Background | Source PCRM

What I’m about to tell you is outrageous but true.

Animals could be forced to “smoke” in terrible tobacco experiments. And our own government is allowing it—actually recommending it!

In this day and age, it is very clear that tobacco is bad for human health. But until the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) makes drastic changes, rats and mice and even monkeys could be subjected to experiments that force it to inhale smoke for hours at a time.

This is a big deal. And PCRM cannot with good conscience stand by and watch this happen. If you feel the same, then sign our petition to the FDA today. Ask them to stop recommending tobacco companies test on animals!

We’re calling this our No Butts About It campaign—this play on words is intended to show the absurdity of the situation. No animal should ever come near a cigarette butt, let alone inhale smoke all day.

I hope we can count on all PCRM supporters—animal lovers like you, Stacey—to help us stop these outrageous experiments. Let’s continue to work so we can save more animal lives!

Thank you for taking action quickly.

here is my wish for 2013…
that human beings would
stop being so mean!!!!

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

1. Ban Backyard Slaughter | Click HERE to submit automatic letter

Source: In Defense of Animals (IDA)

The dark world of “backyard butchers,” who slaughter and butcher animals on makeshift farms, is spreading across the U.S. every day. When backyard slaughter is tolerated, animals suffer immense cruelty, starvation, botched “live” slaughters, and are kept in disgusting and diseased yards. Humane slaughter laws, which require animals to be rendered senseless before slaughter, are not followed; instead animals are sloppily shot with handguns, and experience excruciating agony from mishandled, amateur, often live butchering.

No governmental inspection protects these animals or the sanitation of the yards. Overwhelmed by the upkeep of running slapdash farms, these butchers starve, mistreat, abuse, neglect, and harm animals to horrific and gruesome degrees. The yards pose immense risk to public health, safety, and well-being. Blood and animal byproducts are often illegally disposed of onsite, jeopardizing local groundwater. Without any kind of regulation, the meat is sold to the general public on the black market.

Recently, ALDF filed a lawsuit in Florida on behalf of Hillsborough County residents — who are alarmed by criminal violations of public health codes and animal slaughter and disposal laws, illegal sale of horse, cow, and pig meat, and horrifying cruelty to animals found in these yards. ALDF’s landmark case marks the first time Florida residents have sued to stop the unspeakable acts of cruelty committed by backyard butchers and the threat to public health and safety they pose.

Take Action!

Help ALDF and the animals by stopping the development of backyard slaughter in your neighborhood too. Visit our website to watch the video of our undercover investigation, and to notify your lawmakers about this disturbing practice.


2.  Ask the Department of Defense to Investigate Animal Killings | Click HERE to submit petition

Source: Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM)& Change.org

Next week, PCRM and supporters will file a complaint with the Department of Defense (DOD) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) asking it to investigate contract and animal care violations by an Army unit at Ford Meade in Maryland. Please sign this petition to the OIG asking that these violations be investigated.

In September 2011, the Army unit paid the company SIMMEC Training Solutions $132,160 to shoot more than 100 live animals so military personnel could practice emergency medical procedures. The animals were also likely burned and had multiple limbs amputated. Then they were killed. SIMMEC failed to provide a veterinarian for one of the training sessions—a violation of its contract and the DOD’s animal use policy. But the Army unit never reported the violation, which is itself a violation.

Retired Air Force Special Operations medic MSgt. Ben Rogers has started a petition on Change.org asking the OIG to investigate both the Army unit and SIMMEC for the violations. By holding both accountable, we can take one step closer to replacing the outdated and inhumane use of live animals in military combat trauma training.

Thank you for your help.

3. Dogs shouldn’t die so humans can get high | Click HERE to sign petition

Source: Unleashed Australia

The New Zealand Health Department is currently considering a plan that would see legal ‘party pills’ and synthetic cannabis tested on animals. Animal experimentation in that country is only “allowed if there is a proven benefit and if that benefit outweighs the cost to the animals.” Testing party drugs does not even come close to meeting that standard.

Before getting approval to sell their drugs, manufacturers will have to ensure that their use wouldn’t be harmful to humans. The NZ government has immediately turned to the out-dated and unnecessary option of animal testing to prove this. This is despite initial plans to test the drugs on willing people.

It is expected that the drugs would be tested on rodents and dogs, though testing on these animals is next to useless in predicting the psychoactive effect they would have on humans. As the national president of the NZ SPCA said of the plan, “There’s absolutely no justification for it, no matter which way you look at it.”

Let the NZ Health Department know that they must be high already if they think that testing party drugs on dogs and other animals is a good idea.

manunkind makes technological advances,
but his real deceit,
is in matters of kindness and compassion,
where he beat an all too
hasty retreat

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

3dayz

Please click HERE to sign and send automatic letter

Background | Source 3dayz

Recently investment company Kadans Biofacilities bought a former animal testing facility in Schaijk, the Netherlands which was owned by MSD (Organon). For years the site was used for cruel toxicity tests on dogs until they stopped in July 2011. Kadans wants to revive this horrific past and rent the buildings to companies like BioXpert…

BioXpert is a new contract testing laboratorium – established in 2012 – that will test anything for anybody on any animal. On their website they state: “We can simply provide you with your ‘pre-conditioned’ animals, assist you with your experiment at your institute or in our facilities or take the full responsibility for the planning and execution of your experiment based on your demands and description and provide you with the samples and data.” In other words: as long as BioXpert gets paid, they will perform useless experiments on defenseless animals.

This action is part of the ‘Stop Landerd Cruelty‘ campaign.


Protest text

Dear Tineke Coenen,

With regard to your recently established company BioXpert that performs all kinds of despicable  experiments that cause immense suffering to laboratory animals:

Bioxpert offers the possibility of performing  these experiments on behalf of third parties and is also willing to breed test animals for trading.

The Landerd Campus in Schaijk is discreetly  hidden in the woods to reduce the visibility of animal suffering. This location operates as an animal supply center for other companies that profit from the abuse of defenseless animals.

I’m sending you this email because I find it morally reprehensible to insensitively treat animals as if they were inanimate objects and I urge you to use progressive, animal-free methods instead.

Thank you for taking the time to consider this important appeal.

here we sit,
in cages dark and cold.
here we will die,
we will not grow old.
they poke us, burn us
cut us in two.
oh captors would
you want this
happening to you.

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

Wikimedia Commons

BACKGROUND | SOURCE PCRM

Doctors with PCRM joined concerned Connecticut residents on Oct. 24 for a physician-led demonstration to end the unnecessary use of live pigs in Hartford Hospital’s trauma training course.

Protestors carried signs reading, “End Deadly Pig Labs,” “Using Pigs to Teach Human Medicine?” and “Hartford Hospital: Animal Cruelty Doesn’t Save Lives.” Doctors also delivered a petition signed by nearly 500 Connecticut residents urging the use of lifelike human patient simulators instead of anesthetized animals.

Advanced Trauma Life Support (ATLS) training at Hartford Hospital involves cutting into live pigs and practicing emergency medical procedures. After the training session, the animals are killed. Although the animals are anesthetized during the procedures, they endure the trauma of confinement, shipping, preparation, manipulation, and death.

Nonanimal education methods are exclusively used by 98 percent of ATLS programs in the United States, including Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, and all of the 23 Canadian facilities providing ATLS training. Hartford Hospital already owns the simulator validated for this training and could immediately replace its use of animals.

“Cutting into living animals is a substandard way to teach emergency procedures that will be performed on humans,” says Connecticut surgeon Marjorie Cramer, M.D., F.A.C.S. “Hartford Hospital should use state-of-the-art, human-centered methods for all trauma courses.”


PETITION

Click HERE for petition


WHOM TO CONTACT

Click HERE for online form (select appropriate target, such as General Information)


SUBJECT

Please End the Use of Live Animals in Hartford Hospital’s ATLS Courses


SAMPLE LETTER

I am writing to ask that you immediately replace the use of live pigs in your Advanced Trauma Life Support (ATLS) courses. This practice is cruel and outdated. In fact, your hospital is among only 2 percent of ATLS programs in the United States and Canada that continue to use live animals for this training. Your hospital already owns the American College of Surgeons-approved TraumaMan System, so there is no justification for the continued animal use. Please end this cruel and unnecessary practice immediately.

Thank you for your attention to this urgent appeal.

NAME

pigs are pigs,
but man is
the swine:(

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

Four Paws

BACKGROUND | SOURCE FOUR PAWS

Cosmetic testing on animals was banned within the EU on 11 March 2009. However, the promised final sales ban must be implemented in 2013 otherwise the 2009 ban will be meaningless as cosmetic companies will simply continue to test their ingredients outside the EU and import them for sale. As the proposed ban forbids the sale of all cosmetic ingredients tested outside the EU, this will also have a positive impact towards ending cosmetic testing on animals worldwide.

A decision will be made very soon on whether the ban will be enforced on time and so swift action is required. A delay will be proposed if it is concluded that alternatives to certain tests have not been developed or validated in time. There is no justification to continue animal testing for cosmetics, thousands of ingredients are also already safely used in humans and available for use.


PETITION

Please click HERE for petition


WHOM TO CONTACT

Please click HERE for online webform


SAMPLE LETTER

Dear President Barroso,

As you are aware, cosmetic testing on animals was banned within the EU on 11 March 2009. A final and full-sales ban must be implemented in 2013, otherwise the 2009 ban will be rendered meaningless, as cosmetic companies will simply continue to test their ingredients outside the EU and import them for sale.

As the proposed ban forbids the sale of all cosmetic ingredients tested outside the EU, this will also have a positive impact towards ending cosmetic testing on animals worldwide. With a full ban enforced, the cosmetics industry will still be able to research, develop, and innovate new cosmetics as far as non-animal test methods will allow. This presents a humane, fair, and ethical competitive environment.

There is no justification for the European Commission to continue to permit animal-tested cosmetics to be sold, even on the basis of a derogation. Thousands of ingredients are already available for safe human use and the immense pain and suffering inflicted on animals for a trivial purpose such as cosmetics is unethical, unacceptable, and unnecessary.

Therefore, I ask that you support and fully implement a full and outright ban on the sale of animal-tested cosmetics within the EU, with no exceptions, on 11th March 2013.

As citizens and consumers, we pledge to buy only ethical products and want to see our shelves free from animal-tested cosmetics.

Please ensure that the European Commission keeps it’s promise and bans all animal-tested cosmetics on 11th March 2013.

NAME

for beauty is a human desire,
perfection we seek,
but to kindness we should
aspire.
♥

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

Wikimedia Commons

BACKGROUND | SOURCE FACEBOOK

It’s hard to believe, but now we inform Blockbuster/Dish and its affiliates about what their exorbitant donations to the University of Florida buys- primate torture and archaic frankenscience. We want them to know they are absolutely compliant in hurting primates if they continue funding UF primate torture. Tell Blockbuster/Dish NO MORE DONATIONS TO UF until primate testing is banned!!

It has come to my attention that the University of Florida Foundation donors are responsible for providing $3.2 BILLION in support of UF and as we know they spend it on primate torture. Unbelievably, these donors include corporations who state they act to benefit society; Blockbuster Entertainment Corporation, National Geographic Society, The Humane Society of the United States, PetSmart, The NASCAR Foundation and Anheuser-Busch most recently famous for formally denouncing the horrible and cruel event SnapperFest, saying they love and respect all animals. These giant corporations are hemorrhaging money into UF’s Death Camp and they need to be held accountable for what their money funds!!!

Primates are imprisoned in the University of Florida labs, poisoned, sickened, and killed when alternatives are available. Among 1000s of other animals, more than 200 are forced to endure painful experiments without anesthesia. UF has lost a lawsuit to animal rights activists and the vet records of agony and torture are now being made public.


WHOM TO CONTACT

service@blockbusterexpress.com, blockbuster@adperio.com, press@blockbuster.com,
donation.requests@blockbuster.com, corporate.communications@blockbuster.com,
Michael.kelly@blockbuster.com, nick.sayeedi@blockbuster.com, matt.bernier@blockbuster.com,
copyright.administrator@blockbuster.com, ellen.kramer@blockbuster.com,
lisa.wodell@blockbuster.com, michelle.lueck@blockbuster.com, executivecustomerservice@dish.com,
voe@dish.com, rob.bennett@blockbuster.com, tech@dish.com, chris.rowland@blockbuster.com,
tim.wesley@blockbuster.com, procurement.vendors@blockbuster.com, press@dish.com,
marciedes.metzger@dishnetwork.com, kaia.sunde@dishnetwork.com


SAMPLE LETTER

Dear Blockbuster/Dish,

I am writing today because I found your name on the University of Florida’s special bragging list -  the “honor roll” of generous donors. I want you to know I am going to ask my friends and your supporters in the coming weeks to enjoy movies from your competitors until you no longer support the University of Florida.

No place that does archaic experiments on animals can “clean up their act” -  they need to ban animal testing completely at their school. The whole country of Canada has recently committed to this ban in all of their universities, so a single university has no excuse. There is no work that you do that can make up for supporting an institution using living, feeling, innocent animals for agonizing experiments. I think the only way for you to keep your “good name” is to stop donating money to the University of Florida until they ban primate testing.

The following is a link to the UF website where you are honored for contributing to a university mired in controversy about their animal experiments:

http://www.uff.ufl.edu/AnnualReport/HonorRoll/PC/HonorRoll_Orgs.asp?Honor_Roll_Group=Ambassadors&Level_Name=Silver

See the latest from a UF whistle blower at the following:

http://emptyallcages.com/category/university-of-florida-2/

UF chooses primate torture, most times using 2 and 3-year old primate toddlers, when there are thousands of non-animal alternatives available to teach and use right now:

http://emptyallcages.com/non-animal-alternatives/

The bottom line is that is what those involved with archaic animal research will be able to say is that it must be OK since large corporations give to UF. I think Blockbuster/Dish should pull their money from UF until UF bans animal testing. Please help me ensure that your donations do not become UF blood money by contacting UF today. Your letter can make a difference as a voice for innocent animals trapped in a brutal laboratory.

Thank you for your immediate attention to these innocent suffering animals.

The University of Florida email contacts:

HonorRoll@uff.ufl.edu, ccjysikes@ufl.edu, cmachen@ufl.edu, president@ufl.edu, jysikes@ufl.edu

Sincerely,

blockbuster/dish, do you know,
where your funding of UF goes.
to primate torture and psuedoscience.
please stop sending them money,
with us stand in defiance.
no living being should be experimented,
it’s only value, sadism, evil and
demented.
do not use your dollars to feed
this killing machine,
UF and its medieval methods
vicious and beyond obscene!

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

Kinship Circle

BACKGROUND | SOURCE KINSHIP CIRCLE

They are trapped in trees rigged with nets. Stuffed into mesh sacks. They shriek and claw at enclosures. No one hears. They are taken.

Some are bred on barren, concrete farms that churn out live product for the international animal research trade. Nonhuman primates are valued models for experimentation, though they fail to produce clinical symptoms or data relevant to human disease processes, and can even mislead experimenters with false conclusions.

To reach research labs, animals are crated and trucked for miles. Most wind up in the extreme heat or cold of a plane’s poorly ventilated cargo hold, where they are caged during flights that can last 60 hours.

They enter a world bound by metal bars, pain and fear. Primates are induced with human disease and injury. Experimenters poison, overdose and mutilate monkeys. Electrodes are lodged in exposed brain matter. Seizures are stimulated. Limbs removed…
AIR FRANCE-KLM is the only major European carrier that still ships primates for medical research. PATTON BOGGS mediates global trade and transportation issues as lawyers and lobbyists for the airlines. Both are complicit in cruelty and scientific deceit.


WHAT YOU CAN DO

Ask Air France to join Delta, American, United Airlines, US Airways, British Airways, Lufthansa, Air China, Cathay Pacific, El Al Airlines…and nearly all major airlines that reject primate as cargo. Urge Patton Boggs to distance itself from Air France until the flight company stops primate transfers. Remind Air France that they won’t get your business until an official ban is implemented.


PETITION

Please click HERE to send automated letter


WHOM TO CONTACT

Patton Boggs, LLP – Main USA Lobbytist for Air France:

pbangert@pattonboggs.com, mgootman@pattonboggs.com, nkrayem@pattonboggs.com, tlott@pattonboggs.com, dmayer@pattonboggs.com, smchale@pattonboggs.com, rslater@pattonboggs.com, gwalden@pattonboggs.com, dwaltz@pattonboggs.com, tboggs@pattonboggs.com, tchorba@pattonboggs.com, jchristian@pattonboggs.com, bcooper@pattonboggs.com, mdriver@pattonboggs.com, ddunn@pattonboggs.com, fwisner@pattonboggs.com

Air France-KLM Executives and Management:

adjuniac@airfrance.fr, albassil@airfrance.fr, albernard@airfrance.fr, chboireau@airfrance.fr, xbroseta@airfrance.fr, achallon-kemoun@airfrance.fr, miemeyriat@airfrance.fr, frederic.gagey@klm.com, belebel@airfrance.fr, brmatheu@airfrance.fr, edodier@airfrance.fr, flparly@airfrance.fr, erschramm@airfrance.fr, phcalavia@airfrance.fr, jccros@airfrance.fr, frbrousse@airfrance.fr, peter.hartman@klm.com, erik.varwijk@klm.com, camiel.eurlings@klm.com, MichielVanderEijk@klm.com

Air France-KLM Cargo Airlines Headquarters:

mail.customerservice.cdg@airfrance.fr

Air France-KLM Shareholders Relations:

mail.actionnaires.afklm@airfrance.fr


SAMPLE LETTER

Dear Air France-KLM and Patton Boggs, LLP:

Air France-KLM is the only major European carrier to still ship primates for research. As their advocate, Patton Boggs facilitates global trade and transportation issues for the airlines.

I ask both companies to acknowledge worldwide objection to primate “cargo”. Please consider that 80 percent of responders to a 2010 European Directive about animal research oppose experiments on primates. In the U.S., an Institute Of Medicine report has fueled potential passage of a bill to ban most research on chimps and great apes.

Primate data can rarely be replicated or used reliably in drug/vaccine development. Primates fail to produce clinical symptoms relevant to human disease processes — and even mislead experimenters with false conclusions. Conversely, human-focused systems such as bioinformatics, in-vitro cell/tissue culture analysis, life-like simulators, etc., better evaluate products and treatment for people.

Why should you care? Because Air France and Patton Boggs are conduits to profound animal cruelty.

Primates are trapped in trees and stuffed into mesh sacks. They shriek and claw when taken from native forests. Some are warehoused on breeding farms. To reach research labs, they are crated and trucked for miles. Most wind up in the extreme heat or cold of a plane’s poorly ventilated cargo hold, for flights that can last up to 60 hours.

They enter a world bound by metal bars, pain and fear. Primates are induced with human disease and injury. Experimenters poison, overdose and mutilate monkeys. Electrodes are lodged in exposed brain matter. Seizures are stimulated. Limbs removed… Still, we are no closer to cures for infectious disease, AIDS, neurological disease (Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s), and other ailments studied in primates.

Some 85 vaccines to cure or prevent HIV infection looked good in animals, mostly monkeys, according to Dr. John Pippin, a former Harvard University medical professor who testified before the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Institute of Medicine in 2005. Those vaccines, tested in clinical trials, all failed. In 2012, a Colombia court denied permits for renowned malaria researcher Dr. Manuel Elkin Patarroyo to trap 4,000 night monkeys. After decades of primate research at Patarroyo’s Institute of Immunology Foundation, a malaria cure is nowhere in sight.

I respectfully ask Air France to join Delta, American, Virgin Atlantic, US Airways, British Airways, Lufthansa, Air China, Cathay Pacific, Air India, El Al Airlines…and most big flight companies that reject primate cargo. I urge Patton Boggs to distance itself from the airlines until it officially bans primate transfer for research.

This is a matter of worldwide concern. Thank you for your valuable time and consideration.

Sincerely,

i am locked here in this cage.
frightened and in pain.
why do humans do this to me,
it is really quite insane.
i did nothing wrong yet everyday
they poke and hurt and kill.
maybe the white coats won’t
bother me,
if i lie here,still
KLM- air france
please do not be part
of my death dance

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

Wikimedia Commons

Louisiana friends, please click HERE

Everyone else, please click HERE

Background | Source NEAVS

Keithville, Louisiana, is home to Chimp Haven, currently the only federal sanctuary where chimpanzees no longer needed for research must be retired as required by the CHIMP Act. Unfortunately, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) plan to transfer 100 of 110 chimpanzees recently deemed “ineligible” for research from a Louisiana lab to a lab in Texas. Currently, NIH plans to send only 10 of the 110 to Chimp Haven.

This decision is unfair for the chimpanzees, who deserve the comforts of sanctuary after the hardship they endured, and unfair to Louisiana, which will lose meaningful jobs. We can’t let this happen.

If you live in Louisiana, please use the form HERE to ask your legislators to ask NIH to retire all 110 chimpanzees to Chimp Haven. We encourage you to personalize the message for greater impact.

Please also place a polite call to your legislators. Because calls are less frequent, they have even greater impact. Find your legislators and their contact information HERE.

we share 98% of our DNA,
would you want to live this way,
vacillating between terror and
rage,
being poked, prodded and tortured,
locked in a lonely, dirty cage.
only taken out to be put on
a cold and nasty slab,
in the house of torments
you humans call a lab

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

Wikimedia Commons

BACKGROUND

You can Shut down Mazor Farm. In these critical last moments of the struggle to shut down Mazor Farm, an Israeli monkeys breeding farm selling them to horrible experiments, every voice counts. A 22-year animal rights fight is at its peak & needs your action now.




WHOM TO CONTACT

Israel’s Environment Protection Minister Gilad Erdan

Email: sar@sviva.gov.il


SAMPLE LETTER

Dear Minister Erdan,

I am writing today to express my support regarding your decision to cease providing requisite permits to Mazor Farm, a business that breeds and sells monkeys for animal experimentation; indeed, I extend my appreciation for your decision that will influence the closing of Moshav Mazor Farm. Your compassionate resolution will result in an ethical consequence, liberating more 1000 monkeys and relinquishing them to their natural habitat; future ramifications include rejecting additional exploitation, and the lives potentially stolen will be the lives realistically saved.

Thank you for refusing exploitation and instead observing empathy; I trust the overwhelming support acknowledging your courageous and empathetic decision exemplifies the importance of such and is considered when you finalize this declaration. Your moral decision supporting the closing of Mazor Farm will additionally serve as a model to other communities. I extend my gratitude towards you and hope you will accept my gesture of appreciation and respect, as well as my request that you hasten your plans to abolish the trading of monkeys in Israel for experimentation.

Thank you for taking the time to read this urgent message.

NAME

when you shut down mazor farm,
your kind heart will beat the words
WE DO NO MORE HARM.

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

BACKGROUND

For decades, experimenters at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW) have been conducting cruel and useless taxpayer-funded “sound localization” studies in which cats have steel coils implanted in their eyes, holes drilled into their skulls, and electrodes implanted in their brains. Sometimes, cats used in this experiment have had their ears cut off or are intentionally deafened by having a toxic chemical applied to their inner ear. The cats are then deprived of food for several days in order to coerce them to look in the direction of sounds during experimental sessions in which their heads are immobilized by a bolt screwed into their skulls.

Internal UW documents and photographs obtained by PETA in response to a successful lawsuit detail the miserable life and death of one of the cats, a gentle tabby named Double Trouble, who was abused and killed in this barbaric experiment. In one instance, Double Trouble woke up while experimenters were cutting into her head. Following a series of invasive surgeries, she developed infections, became lethargic and depressed, started to twitch, and suffered paralysis in half her face. After UW deemed the experiment a failure, the experimenters killed and decapitated Double Trouble so that they could examine her brain.

Experimenters have justified the use of 30 cats like Double Trouble per year in this cruel project not by saying that it would enhance human health but by stating that they needed to “keep up a productive publication record that ensures our constant funding.”

Shockingly, the federal government continues to support this irrelevant and deadly project and has provided UW with more than $3 million in grant money to abuse animals—even though researchers at other institutions around the world are already using modern methods with human volunteers to investigate how the brain locates and processes sound.

PETA has called on federal officials to investigate the circumstances surrounding Double Trouble’s horrendous treatment and take disciplinary action against UW for likely violations of federal animal welfare laws. You can help our efforts by contacting the National Institutes of Health and urging the agency to cut funding for this crude and deadly project.

Putting your subject line and letter into your own words will help draw attention to your e-mail.


WHOM TO CONTACT

E-mail
General Questions: NIHinfo@od.nih.gov
Contáctenos en Español

Phone
301-496-4000,
TTY 301-402-9612

Mail
National Institutes of Health
9000 Rockville Pike
Bethesda, Maryland 20892
Addresses for the Institutes and Centers


SUGGESTED SUBJECT

Cut Funding for Cruel Experiment on Cats at UW-Madison!


SAMPLE LETTER

To Whom It Concerns,

I was dismayed to learn that the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders has given more than $3 million for a series of cruel experiments on cats at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW). In the studies, cats have steel coils implanted in their eyes, holes drilled into their skulls, and electrodes implanted in their brains. Sometimes, cats used in these UW experiments have had their ears cut off or are intentionally deafened by having a toxic chemical applied to their inner ear. The cats are then deprived of food for several days in order to coerce them to look in the direction of sounds during experimental sessions in which their heads are immobilized by a bolt screwed into their skulls.

Internal UW documents and photographs obtained by PETA show that one cat subjected to this experiment, an orange tabby cat named Double Trouble, woke up while experimenters were cutting into her head. Following a series of invasive surgeries, she developed infections, became lethargic and depressed, started to twitch, and suffered paralysis in half her face. After UW deemed the experiment a failure, the experimenters killed and decapitated Double Trouble so that they could examine her brain.

Equally shocking is that UW experimenters justified the use of the 30 cats for this crude experiment in their protocol not by saying that it would enhance human health but by stating that it was necessary for them to “keep up a productive publication record that ensures our constant funding.” I find it troubling that millions of tax dollars are being spent to abuse and kill animals and further the personal careers of a few animal experimenters, rather than being invested in research that would benefit the American people.

Today, many laboratories are conducting modern and relevant sound localization studies using human volunteers. I urge your agency to end its financial support of this cruel and sloppy experiment at UW and divert funding toward humane and applicable human-based research.

NAME

we stand in defiance
against psuedoscience,
torture is what it be,
a crime against nature
and society.

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

PETA

Please click HERE to sign automatic letter

Background | Source PETA

Each year, members of the Canadian military travel to Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC) in Suffield, Alberta, to participate in a cruel “live agent training” drill in which live pigs are exposed to toxic chemical weapons such as sarin and mustard agents. Pigs subjected to this crude exercise suffer from seizures, irregular heartbeats, difficulty breathing, and bleeding and can even die.

Instead of tormenting animals, other military and civilian training programs around the world now use modern non-animal methods such as lifelike human patient simulators, which—unlike crude procedures on pigs—can be programmed to mimic the human response to a chemical-weapon attack.

In 2011, following a PETA campaign, the U.S. Army replaced the use of animals in its chemical warfare training program, stating that its switch to superior human simulators “was made possible by improved technology, the development of alternative training methods, shifting chemical threat environments, and changes in the medical competencies required of first responders during a chemical incident.” Similarly, doctors working with the Israel Defense Forces have developed an effective chemical attack preparedness course that uses only sophisticated human simulators, noting that, “An animal laboratory session is viewed as unacceptable.”

Because valid simulators exist and are being used worldwide, DRDC’s poisoning of pigs—in addition to being extremely cruel and ineffective—clearly violates Canadian animal welfare guidelines that require that alternatives to the use of animals be used when available.

Please help spare pigs from this archaic and cruel chemical-casualty training right now by sending polite e-mails to Canadian military officials urging them to take immediate action to replace the use of animals with superior non-animal training methods.

live agent training drill,
for innocent pigs
a bitter pill.
no reason to use
such methods,
stop them now,
not later.
use the kinder, more
efficient
human patient
simulator

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

Target: The Food and Drug Administration for Tobacco Products

Goal: Reconsider requiring tobacco companies to test their new “light” or “mild” cigarette formula on animals.

Imagine being locked in a cramped cell for several months as cigarette smoke is pumped directly through your nostrils for hours at a time. Sadly, PETA claims that this is the fate of the tobacco industry’s lab rats before they’re killed and dissected in the name of a bad human habit. And now, the industry has plans to test its new “light” or “mild” formula, which they’re pushing to claim is less harmful for the 47 million adults in the United States who light up. According to the Food and Drug Administration draft guidelines, animal lives must be put in danger through cruel animal testing in order for the tobacco industry to bring its “light” cigarettes to the market. Tell the FDA that defenseless animals must not be sacrificed for still-harmful tobacco products.

According to PETA, testing tobacco products on animals does not make them safe for human consumption because humans and animals often do not develop the same types of diseases from tobacco smoke. In addition, these results are often used by the industry to deny links between smoking and deadly diseases, like cancer.

In a Washington Times report published on Monday, May 28, tobacco products are responsible for the deaths of 1,200 people per day in this country alone. And if you’re thinking “light” automatically means “better”, you’re in for a big surprise.

The National Cancer Institute claimed in a recent report that “[T]here is no convincing evidence that changes in cigarette design … have resulted in an important decrease in the disease burden caused by cigarette use.”

Animal testing can often be dangerous and cruel. In this case, it can also be ineffective. Though several other countries including the United Kingdom and Canada do not test on animals, the FDA and tobacco industry are allowing animals to senselessly suffer and die for products humans know are bad for us. By signing the petition below, you will tell the FDA that the public will not stand for these guidelines.


WHOM TO CONTACT

Email: AskCTP@fda.hhs.gov

Click on and sign petition HERE


SUBJECT

Don’t Allow the Tobacco Industry to Test New “Light” Formula on Animals


SAMPLE LETTER

Dear Food and Drug Administration for Tobacco Products,

Requiring the tobacco industry to inhumanely test products on defenseless animals is senseless and wrong. These animals are often locked away and subjected to brutal treatment, disease, and death.

All animals deserve to be treated with compassion and respect. The National Cancer Institute recently reported that there is “no convincing evidence” that “light” tobacco products will leave human users any better off. In addition, humans and animals do not suffer from the same diseases from tobacco products, so even if these products are deemed safer when tested on animals, the results may be different when they are released to the public.

It is imperative that you reconsider your draft guidelines to ensure that both animals and humans are kept safe. Please commit to taking action immediately.

Sincerely,

NAME

you want to smoke.
that’s your choice,
animals cannot decide.
so we are their.
voice!

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

Wikimedia Commons

Please click HERE to sign and send automatic letter

Background | Source PCRM

Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia informed PCRM this week that it has replaced the use of kittens with nonanimal training methods to teach future pediatricians.

This change is the result of PCRM’s yearlong campaign and the support of our members. More than 26,000 e-mails were sent to Albert Einstein Medical Center’s administrators over the past three months encouraging the hospital to take this progressive step, and the medical center listened!

A certified letter from Albert Einstein Medical Center informed PCRM that the hospital has “discontinued the use of animals to teach endotracheal intubation.” The hospital now joins the 97 percent of pediatrics residency programs in the United States and Canada that view nonanimal methods as not only more humane but educationally superior.

Because of this progressive change at Albert Einstein Medical Center, PCRM is cancelling our demonstration scheduled for Aug. 15, and we will turn our attention elsewhere. If you were planning to attend, thank you for your dedication and support.

Unfortunately, while Albert Einstein has decided to make this necessary change, East Carolina University (ECU) continues to use ferrets in endotracheal intubation training. Please contact ECU Brody School of Medicine dean Paul R.G. Cunningham, M.D., F.A.C.S., and ask him to replace the use of ferrets with human-based medical simulation.

Petition Text

I am writing to ask that you immediately end the use of ferrets in the East Carolina University (ECU) pediatrics residency program. The use of live animals for this purpose is cruel and outdated. Ferrets used in this training have suffered tracheal bleeding and may also suffer bruising, scarring, and other permanent injury. Ninety-five percent of pediatrics residency programs in the United States and Canada use human-based simulation methods for this training. ECU is also the last program in North Carolina to use animals for this training. It is time for ECU to end this cruel and unnecessary practice.

PETA

BACKGROUND | SOURCE PETA

Air France claims to be making the sky “the best place on Earth.” However, Air France continues to ship monkeys to laboratories, making the sky a terrifying place for animals.

These monkeys spend their time in the sky crammed into tiny wooden crates—often in the dark cargo holds just underneath unsuspecting Air France passengers—before they arrive at notorious laboratories such as Shin Nippon Biomedical Laboratories (SNBL) and Covance, where they will be tormented and killed in cruel experiments.

Partly because of PETA’s successful campaigns, almost all other airlines—including Air China, British Airways, Delta Air Lines, and American Airlines—now refuse to transport monkeys to laboratories.

With your support, we can help save monkeys from this cruel fate. Thank you!


PETITION

Click HERE to sign letter


WHOM TO CONTACT

mail.customerservice.cdg@airfrance.fr


SUBJECT

Stop Transporting Primates to Laboratories


SAMPLE LETTER, COURTESY BUAV

Dear Air France,

I was shocked to learn that your airline is involved in the transportation of monkeys to laboratories. It is unacceptable that these sensitive animals, ripped from their families and homes, are then subjected to the stress of being packed into small crates and shipped as cargo on your airline to end up in laboratories where they will suffer in experiments.

I urge you to join the increasing number of airlines that have made the decision to stop their involvement in this cruelty. Until you do, I will not be flying with your airline.

NAME

they landed one day,
and took man away.
for their version of science,
just sadistic play.
so when you send
monkeys to death
and to sorrow,
just remember,
it could be you
when the spacemen
land,
tomorrow

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

Facebook, Tino Verducci

BACKGROUND

Phoenix Air Group was recently contracted by Novartis to transport a group of non-human primates from Barbados to Italy. The animals were destined for laboratory experimentation.

Novartis is trying to get monkeys in the next days and taking them abroad in Italy through vans. Italian airports are now considered dangerous for their image. We must act now!

The final destination of these animals is the Novartis Vaccines & Diagnostics Ltd, a company based in Siena, Via Fiorentina, 1.

It ‘s the second time this year that Novartis cancelled an order of primates for experimentation. The first time it happened in March, close to the HARLAN scandal. That time was enough that the news leaked out and become public domain. It was a clear sign, that which the vivisectors like working in the shadows and no one knows what they do to animals, where prisoners are kept, where and when they come.

In Barbados and the neighboring islands of Nevis & StKitts, monkeys are yellow-hunted because they are considered harmful to crops and sent by some companies to laboratories. Doing this, however, is become increasingly difficult since airlines such as Amerijet, Caribbean Airlines, Choice Airways, Monarch Air and others have ceased to transport primates for vivisection from the islands of the Caribbean. The only way that vivisectors have to bring these animals to their death is to hire charter flights, such as Phoenix Air.

This moment is so important to give a signal and also to ask Phoenix Air to halt the loading and transport of animals for
vivisection.


WHOM TO CONTACT

Mark H. Thompson
Phoenix Air Group, Inc.
100 Phoenix Air Drive SW
Cartersville, GA 30120
USA

Email:

mthompson@phoenixair.com, charter@phoenixair.com, info@phoenixair.com


SAMPLE LETTER

Dear Mr. Thompson,

It is my understanding that Phoenix Air Group was recently contracted by Novartis to transport a group of non-human primates from Barbados to Italy. The animals were destined for laboratory experimentation. I urge you to dissociate Phoenix Air Group from the cruelty and suffering of the international trade in primates by refusing to transport primates destined for the research industry.

Each year, on the islands of Barbados and St. Kitts & Nevis, hundreds of green/vervet monkeys are torn from their families and forest homes and either exported directly for biomedical research or imprisoned on farms to produce offspring to be exported to laboratories around the world. Once wild and free, these sensitive and intelligent animals end their lives in laboratories where pain and suffering are routine.

There are an increasing number of airlines that were once carriers of primates, but which now refuse to transport primates for the research industry. Airlines that have made this compassionate decision include leading cargo airlines such as Lufthansa Cargo, Cargolux and DHL Aviation, as well as the major airlines American Airlines, Delta Airlines, United Airlines, US Airways, British Airways, Korean Air and Caribbean Airlines.

Thank you for taking the time to consider this important appeal.

NAME

mr thompson and phoenixair
the world is watching, and we care.
please do not transport primates to a fate,
that if it happened to you, you would hate.
do not be part of this evil plan,
primates were not put here to be the victims of man.
on their tropical islands, let these green/vervet monkeys remain,
not torture bound on any of your planes.

Karen Lyons Kalmenson

BACKGROUND

Every year, tens of thousands of nonhuman primates are transported from countries such as China, Mauritius, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Indonesia to the U.S. to be imprisoned in laboratories and tormented in experiments. Some are bred in captivity on cramped, squalid monkey factory farms, while others are stolen from their families in the wild.

The traumatized monkeys are crammed into small wooden crates and transported in the backs of trucks and the dark and terrifying cargo holds of planes, often on passenger flights just below unsuspecting customers.

According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, nearly 23,000 nonhuman primates were brought into the U.S. in 2010—nearly all of them destined for laboratories. Nearly 3,000 monkeys were imported by animal testing conglomerate Shin Nippon Biomedical Laboratories (SNBL), where recent photos and video footage leaked by a whistleblower show sick, distraught monkeys suffering horribly from tests in which they were injected with experimental chemicals.

Almost every major airline in the world—including Delta Air Lines, Qantas, American Airlines, British Airways, Aer Lingus, Cathay Pacific, and dozens of others—refuses to take any part in this violent industry and prohibits the transportation of primates to laboratories. However, an increasingly small group of airlines—including Air China, Air France, China Eastern Airlines, United Airlines, Philippine Airlines, and Vietnam Airlines—continues to profit from animals’ misery by transporting monkeys destined for U.S. laboratories.

Please be a voice for the monkeys who are suffering in the primate trade. Take a minute of your time now to urge airlines that still transport monkeys to U.S. laboratories to join their peers and adopt a formal policy against the transportation of nonhuman primates for use in experiments.


PETITION

Please click and sign HERE


WHOM TO CONTACT

Click HERE for United’s online webform


SUBJECT

Stop Transporting Primates to Laboratories


SAMPLE LETTER, COURTESY PETA

Dear Officials,

I was dismayed to learn that your airline continues to facilitate cruelty to animals by transporting primates destined for laboratories. These highly social, intelligent beings are routinely mutilated, poisoned, deprived of food and water, forcibly immobilized in restraint devices, infected with painful and deadly diseases, and psychologically tormented.

Additionally, primates suffer from the long and grueling transport in the cargo holds of planes and in the backs of trucks. For these reasons, nearly every major airline including Cathay Pacific, Delta Air Lines, American Airlines, and Aer Lingus refuses to transport primates for use in experiments. It is shameful that your airline lags behind and continues to support this cruel practice.

Please join leading airline companies and adopt a formal policy prohibiting the transport of primates destined for laboratories to ensure that your company plays no role in the suffering of these animals.

NAME

primates

our trip is long,
and filled with
apprehension.
we did nothing
wrong,
why this detention.
and when we arrive
in your foreign land,
we are subjected to
torments, we
do not understand.
your species, human
is supposed to be
smart,
but if you were,
in this cruelty
you would never
take part.

Karen Lyons Kalmenson