Four petitions, please take action

Making the Link

1. Please click HERE to sign petition demanding harshest penalty to man who dragged dog
2. Please click HERE to tell the NFL to Stop Funding Sports-Injury Experiments on Animals
3. Please click HERE to stop massacre on Romania’s dogs
4. Please click HERE to Tell the Snack Food 20: Cut Conflict Palm Oil, Not Rainforests

1. Background Source Focus

The Regional Prosecutor’s Office in the southern Bulgarian town of Asenovgrad has launched a probe into a case about a man who violently tormented his dog, announced the press center of Plovdiv District Police Directorate.

The prosecutor’s office want to find out whether there is evidence for a crime. The regional police station in the town of Asenovgard received a message about a dog tied to a car and being dragged behind in the village of Topolovo. The police found out that on Friday noon a 55-year-old man from the same village decided to punish his dog he was taking care of and tied the animal to the drawbar of his car and dragged (him) to a nearby ravine in the village and threw (him) there. The dog was found on Saturday alive, suffering grazes on (his) body. (He) was taken to a vet and the case was referred to the prosecutor on duty at Asenovgrad Regional Prosecutor’s Office.

Additional background HERE

2. Background Source PETA

For years, the National Football League Foundation, formerly known as NFL Charities, has quietly funded horrific and deadly sports-injury experiments on dogs, mice, rats, and other animals at Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of California–Los Angeles, the University of Notre Dame, and other schools and private laboratories.

Images from NFL Foundation-funded head-injury experiment on rats

These projects, many of which are ongoing, are crudely designed to recreate injuries on the football field. They have involved inflicting severe knee injuries on dogs, after which the animals are killed and have their legs cut off; repeatedly slamming heavy weights into rats’ heads to create brain and spinal cord injuries and skull fractures; and cutting open the heads of mice and delivering crushing blows to cause traumatic brain injuries. Many animals have even died during the studies because of the severe injuries that they sustained.

In addition to these experiments being cruel, studies have shown that they do not accurately replicate the complex injuries sustained by football players, and data and treatments derived from brain-injury experiments on animals have repeatedly failed to help human patients.

3. Background Source IDA

IDA has learned from our Romanian activist friends that it is now legal to murder every stray dog in Romania. On September 10th, a law passed sanctioning the killing of all homeless dogs captured in the streets, sterilized or not, friendly or not, puppies or old, and those in the shelters. According to witnesses in Bucharest, many of the known strays have already disappeared. Gunshots have been heard at night. Hundreds of thousands of dogs’ lives are at stake. The week leading up to this criminal government activity was a state-inspired kind of mob violence toward stray dogs, resulting in a horrific ongoing massacre.

The recent frenzy began when Ionut, a four-old boy, was tragically killed on September 2nd, and his death was immediately blamed on stray dogs. The real story emerged, but too late to assuage the hysteria: the boy was found dead in a very rugged area, where a child was unlikely to go. There were clear indications that he had been molested and thrown over a fence in an area dogs use as shelter. And because there were visible dog bites, the medical examiner admitted that he didn’t release the information about the boy’s sexual abuse because of intense pressure by the media, who had already run with the story that stray dogs killed the boy. And the war was on.

The Romanian President, Traian Basescu, blithely ignoring European Union humanitarian laws with respect to dog population management, urged the government to create an emergency ordinance that all stray dogs be killed at once, essentially authorizing its citizens to viciously execute stray dogs everywhere throughout the country. The President of the Chamber of Deputies echoed the President’s decree and asked for draft legislation. As the rest of the world shudders in disbelief, Romania has just legalized the genocide of hundreds of thousands of its dogs.

The powerless prey in this deadly dog hunt have been shot in the streets, beaten to death by gangs, skinned alive; stoned and hacked to death, poisoned; impaled on steel rakes, stabbed and left to die with their guts hanging out, hanged and mutilated, little puppies burnt alive, friendly community dogs butchered in public shelters, all of which is being gruesomely documented. Since the law passed, the government is allowing rescuers 14 days to save as many strays as possible and get them to makeshift shelters or available homes, but the sad reality that is there only a handful of rescuers who can do only so much.

The falsified account of a murder actually perpetrated by a pedophile has been the perfect pretext for ridding the country of its massive stray dog problem, and, in the process, a perfectly fiendish excuse not to use public money allocated for strays and a beautiful solution to enrich craven and greedy officials’ pockets. Apparently, in this latest Romanian horror show, murdering dogs has become a full-blown industry, where tens of millions of Euros intended for sterilization programs are never actually spent on trying to resolve the catastrophic issue of stray dogs, many of whom are cast aside by horribly irresponsible “owners.” For 20 years, dogs have been captured and taken to shelters, which Romanian activists refer to as “extermination camps,” where if the dogs don’t succumb because of hunger or thirst or freezing to death, they are then tortured and killed. Apparently, there is money to be made for every dog killed and cremated, at 120 Euros a dog, with public taxpayer funds being exchanged between various crooked city and government agencies.

4. Background Source RAN

Expansion of palm oil plantations into Indonesia’s and Malaysia’s rainforests is pushing wild orangutans to the brink of extinction. We have reached The Last Stand of the Orangutan—but it’s not too late.

Take action now to call on the Snack Food 20—companies that control some of the best-known snack food brands in the world—to remove “conflict palm oil” tied to rainforest destruction and orangutan extinction from their products.

Only 60,600 orangutans remain in the wilds of Sumatra and Borneo, so we’re trying to get 60,600 humans to stand up for them by calling on the Snack Food 20 to cut conflict palm oil, not rainforests. Will you be one of them?

Order a FREE vegan kit: http://www.peta.org/living/vegetarian-living/free-vegetarian-starter-kit.aspx

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been alive for more than 60 years,
have laughed a lot and shed many
tears,
so here i sit, waiting and working
for the day,
when kindness and compassion,
will lead the way.
been waiting for decades.
and cannot wait
for many more…
time for cruelty and ignorance
to go out the f*cking door!

Karen Lyons Kalmenson