Urgent actions, please participate

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