———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Kinship Circle - kinshipcircle [at] accessus.net
Date: Thu, May 15, 2008 at 7:54 PM
Subject: 5/16: PROCTER & GAMBLE CALL-IN DAY (if you miss it, still write)

KINSHIP CIRCLE PRIMARY - PERMISSION TO CROSS-POST AS WRITTEN

5/15/08: MAY 16, 2008 IS PROCTER & GAMBLE CALL-IN DAY

EMAIL kinshipcircle [at] accessus.net FOR WORD DOC OF A FORMATTED LETTER.
Easily modify letter and copy/paste it into an email or print out to fax or mail.

Call, email, fax or write — on May 16, from 9:00am to 5:00pm EST — to politely ask Procter & Gamble to end ALL animal experiments. P&G utilizes SOME animal-free tests. Ask them to go 100% cruelty-free.

If you miss the May 16 date, send comments anyway! Animals are regularly poisoned to test chemicals used in hundreds of Procter & Gamble brands: Tide, Dove, Cover Girl, Olay, Bounty, Crest, Febreeze, Cascade, Pantene, Herbal Essences, Head & Shoulders, Iams/Eukanuba…

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Saluting Animal Moms on Mother’s Day

According to writer Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the trials of motherhood make moms the great vacationless class. Although she may have been talking about the human variety—the moms who are near and dear to us—other animals show the same tireless dedication to their children. PETA hopes that this Mother’s Day, while you are praising your family’s matriarch, you’ll also remember that some of the best moms in the world are found in the animal kingdom.

Northern Fur Seals

Human mothers tuned in to Channel Mom may find themselves responding to anybody’s child when they hear someone calling the M word, but fur seals never make this mistake. Fresh from foraging for food, moms have to find their young quickly in a sea of hundreds—or possibly thousands—of seals, so both mother and pup depend on their uncanny powers of vocal recognition to find one another. Both will call out and answer, responding selectively to one another until they are reunited.

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From: In Defense of Animals - takeaction [at] idausa.org
Date: Mon, Apr 21, 2008 at 9:49 PM
Subject: World Week for Animals in Laboratories is Here!

World Week for Animals in Laboratories is Here!

Call-In Days: Urge NIH to End Cruel Animal Experiments

Many people find this hard to believe, but the U.S. government continues to sink millions of dollars each year into funding cruel and outdated experiments on animals to test the effects of nicotine and tobacco. Please join IDA during this week’s observance of World Week for Animals in Laboratories (WWAIL) to call attention to this outrage and speak out in opposition.

IDA’s Up in Smoke campaign highlights the futility and inhumanity of nicotine experiments on newborn and pregnant animals. These are some examples:

- Since 1992, Elliot Spindel at Oregon Health and Science University delivers steady doses of nicotine to pregnant monkeys through pumps implanted into their backs. The babies are cut out of their mothers’ wombs in order to dissect their lungs.

- At Texas A&M University, Ursula Winzer-Serhan forces baby rats to consume nicotine mixed with baby formula at the equivalent of three packs of cigarettes a day. After about a week of being fed nicotine, the babies’ heads are cut off and their brains are dissected.

- Researcher Kent Pinkerton at University of California, Davis, subjects pregnant rhesus monkeys to smoking chambers where they are forced to inhale cigarette smoke for six hours each day, five days a week. When the infants are ten weeks old, they are killed by lethal injection and their lungs are dissected for analysis.

Over the past five years, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has given at least $16.5 million to this category of research. This appalling figure does not reflect the total cost of all nicotine research on animals, but only that which focuses on nicotine’s effect on fetal and newborn development.

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getcher grist ecard here!

Call be an eco-grouch, but I’m finding it hard to get into the Earth Day spirit this year. I woke up feeling a bit ambivalent; caught a bit of Living with Ed during breakfast, and then discovered that HGTV’s airing a slate of “green” programming all day. Crank level rose. “Ooooo, if I’m near the teevee at 6, I can watch some yuppie couple shop for an ‘environmentally friendly’ vacation home (Um, is there such a thing? Doesn’t the sheer wastefulness of owning a second home trump the recycled cork floors?) in Hawaii.” Like, O-M-F-G. (That one’s for you, Mike Galanos. Your fainting couch should be arriving via Fed-fucking-Ex any day now.)

Time for work. While shuffling some files around and otherwise procrastinating, caught this blog post over at The Boiling Point.

If I see one more article about a gazillion pieces of fancy overpriced “organic” or “recycled” designer crap we can cram into our lives to pretend we’re doing something significant to save the planet, I’m going to shoot some (organic!?) steam out my ears.

With every Earth Day there comes a flood of special newspaper and magazine “Green Issues,” all generally pushing the same deluded feel-good idea that if only we replaced non-green products with slightly more green products, we’d really Make a Big Difference and Save the Planet. We don’t really need to change our consumer culture or hold corporate polluters accountable or enact sweeping and drastic environmental legislation–we just need to change our lightbulbs and wear organic cotton T-shirts. […]

Anyway, here’s the thing: buying more fancy stuff you don’t need (no matter how organic or recycled it is) is fundamentally an anti-green act. If you replace your perfectly good couch with some fancy organic or more sustainably produced designer creation, that does not mean you are saving the planet. It means you are buying a nice couch that is slightly less destructive than another couch. You’re still consuming, and you’re still creating waste. You are not a hero, and you are not an activist, you’re just a less destructive shopper.

And shopping is not a substitute for action. Buying a red sweatshirt or red iPod that donates 1% of its profits to a poorly-run AIDS charity that spends all its money advertising red sweatshirts or red iPods is not real action for change. A lot of this feel-good, do-nothing shopping as “activism” (ActivismTM) crap is just an excuse to give yourself an excuse to BUY MORE CRAP YOU DON’T need.

Ambivalence clear now.

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———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Kinship Circle - kinshipcircle [at] accessus.net
Date: Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 6:07 PM
Subject: 5/1: NAT’L CALL-IN DAY FOR DOWNED ANIMALS

KINSHIP CIRCLE PRIMARY - PERMISSION TO CROSS-POST AS WRITTEN

When you speak for animals, speak intelligently. You are all they have!

www.kinshipcircle.org/fact_sheets/DownedOnTheFarmPHOTOS.pdf

MARK YOUR CALENDAR: 5/1/08
National Call-In Day To Stop Unspeakable Suffering Of Downed Animals

Electric prods shock the heads, necks, spines and rectums of animals crumpled on concrete. Their eyes blink, but their bodies are limp. Organs have begun to fail. Some have crushed bones, torn ligaments. Still, heavy chains drag them. Forklift blades toss their giant bodies as they moan in pain. Concentrated water jets are fired into their nostrils and throats. “Get ‘em up!” These are downed animals. Suspended between life and death, they are forced to stand for inspection at slaughterhouses like the Chino, Calif.-based Westland/Hallmark Meat Company… Brenda Shoss, Kinship Circle

WHEN: NATIONAL CALL-IN DAY! Thursday, May 1, 2008

WHO: Call the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and ask for your U.S. representative’s and two U.S. senators’ offices.

WHAT: A minimum 30-second call urging your legislators to: “Please cosponsor H.R. 661/S. 394, the Downed Animal And Food Safety Protection Act.”

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———- Forwarded message ———-
From: In Defense of Animals - takeaction [at] idausa.org
Date: Wed, Apr 9, 2008 at 6:34 PM
Subject: World Week for Animals in Laboratories

World Week for Animals in Laboratories

Make plans to get active during WWAIL: April 20 - 26

Please join IDA to make this year’s World Week for Animals in Laboratories (WWAIL), April 20 - 26, the most compelling and effective year yet in speaking out against the abhorrent use of animals in testing and research.

Although millions of animals still continue to suffer and die in laboratories, there is cause to be hopeful that real change is on the horizon.

A Landmark Agreement

In February, 2008, three U.S. government agencies, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Toxicology Program (NTP), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), signed a five-year agreement to create innovative and animal-free methods to evaluate the safety of drugs and chemicals with the goal of phasing out animal tests entirely.

The NRC’s Groundbreaking Report

In July, 2007, the prestigious National Research Council (NRC) issued a report, “Toxicology for the 21st Century,” which outlines a new approach that would rely less on animal studies and focus instead upon in vitro methods. According to the report, “Over time, the need for traditional animal testing could be greatly reduced, and possibly even eliminated someday.”

Broad and sweeping changes are slowly being realized for animals in labs. Yet millions still remain captive in cages, subject to intolerable cruelty. They will not live to see the day that these changes come about, which is why we urgently need you to join forces with IDA and other animal-protection organizations to vigorously work for such a transformation to happen as soon as possible. While there is reason to celebrate, there are still far too many scientists who adhere to obsolete, imprecise, and heartless animal experiments.

Never-Ending Nicotine Experiments

It may be unfathomable, but in 2008, many animals still die in cruel, archaic, and useless nicotine experiments to tests tobacco’s deleterious effects on the body. That’s why IDA has developed our Up in Smoke campaign, which targets experiments that force pregnant and newborn animals to be pumped full of nicotine. This is just one example of the kind of horrendous animal experiments that we need to stop. Sadly, there are many such vile experiments occurring daily in laboratories.

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Tagged: bbc documentary penguins

Since I posted about the Iraq War over on my other blog today (blogging it over there so we don’t have to blog it over here; and oh yeah, today is Shock & Awe’s 5-year anniversary, donthcha know?), I wasn’t planning on a second post for you guys and gals. Then I saw that Elaine (of Elaine Vigneault fame) blogged about war’s toll on non-human animals, specifically pointing to Kinship Circle’s Animals: War’s Unseen Collateral Damage factsheet, a thumbnail of which I often come across as I crosspost most of KC’s email alerts.

You can read the entire two-page factsheet (and download a high-res copy) here. Please do, and forward a it on to your friends and family as well. It’s important that we remember the human and non-human victims of dubya’s War on Terror war on terra, today and always.

And if you need an lol, check out my anniversary post at Smite Me!: Shocked and Awed and LOLed WTFed all over. And then check out some of the actions you can take to help end dubya’s war. Or at least let him know how naughty he’s been. Not that her cares either way, but still.

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Tagged: action alerts war iraq war on terra war on terror george w. bush dick cheney impeach impeachment Democrats.com Human Rights First refugees displaced Oil Change International global warming climate change environment environmental environmentalism environmentalist Impeach Bush ImpeachBush.org Ramsey Clark Robert Wexler kinship circle animals animal rights animal welfare middle east dog canine cat feline pet companion animal wildlife conservation

Here’s wishing y’all a happy Sunshine Week from the dreary depths of the midwest.

Via the Bill of Rights Defense Committee*:

“Sunshine is the best of disinfectants,” said Judge Louis Brandeis about the power of public scrutiny to scrub clean the dark corners of government abuse. The American Society of Newspaper Editors has named March 16-22 of this year “Sunshine Week”, a week-long assertion of the public’s right to know what its government is doing.

The week’s events include:

* March 14 - A National Freedom of Information Day Conference, sponsored by the First Amendment Center;

* March 17 - A National Freedom of Information Day Celebration, sponsored by Collaboration on Government Secrecy;

* March 18 - Remarks by Associated Press President Tom Curley at the National Press Club;

* March 19 - Webcast Government Secrecy: Censoring Your Rights with Mickey Edwards, from the Aspen Institute, and former Republican member of Congress from Oklahoma; Ann Beeson, from the Open Society Institute, formerly with the American Civil Liberties Union; and John Podesta from the Center for American Progress, formerly president Clinton’s Chief of Staff. From 1 to 2:30 p.m. EST at the Washington Press Club, and also available online.

* March 20 - Professor Lawrence Lessig on corruption in government, sponsored by the Sunlight Foundation.

In 2007, Sunshine Week marked an effort by Congress to pass “sunshine” legislation, such as:

* A bill protecting whistleblowers (H.R. 985), which passed the House 331-94 on March 14, 2007. The bill has not made it out of committee in the Senate.

* A Freedom of Information Amendments Act (H.R. 1309), which passed the House 308-117 on March 14, 2007. H.R. 1309, however, was unable to make it through the Senate, so in mid-December, Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and John Kyl (R-AZ) pushed through a moderated version (S. 2488) on voice votes, which became law on December 31.

What You Can Do:

* Ideas for local Sunshine Week events can be found in Bright Ideas, an assemblage of insights first published in 2007.

* Campaign resources, including public service announcements, brochures and opinion editorials, are available by clicking here.

You can find out more at www.sunshineweek.org.

* They’re like the ACLU, but with principles n stuff.

(Crossposted from Smite Me! [.net])

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Tagged: action alerts sunshine week politics government government transparency holidays observances bordc Bill of Rights Defense Committee aclu american civil liberties union civil liberties george w. bush war on terra Freedom of Information Freedom of Information Day Freedom of Information Act FOIA

As a follow-up to Susan’s post, I just wanted to remind y’all to check out the HSUS’s 14th annual Spay Day USA website at www.spaydayusa.org. You can also find additional info on their main website, here.

And remember, it’s not just non-human animals who breed like rabbits. Yeah, I’m talking about the v-word. Hey, if it’s good enough for Rover, then it’s good enough for Roger. Snip, snip, snip!

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Tagged: animals animal rights animal welfare holidays observances spay neuter spay day spay day usa pet companion animal dog canine cat feline overpopulation hsus humane society of the united states vasectomy

My name is Susan Daffron and I’m the founder of the National Association of Pet Rescue Professionals (www.naprp.com) and the author of books on caring for adopted dogs and cats called Happy Hound (www.happyhoundbook.com) and Happy Tabby (www.happytabbybook.com).

Spay Day is February 26, this year and I thought I’d share a list of reasons why it’s so important to “fix” your pets because so many myths continue to exist when it comes to spaying and neutering. Here are three facts:

1. Spayed or neutered animals are healthier. Female cats and dogs can’t get uterine or ovarian cancer and the possibility that the animal will get breast cancer is greatly reduced. Neutering reduces roaming and fighting and most animals lose the desire to constantly mark their territory.

2. Spayed or neutered animals live longer. Statistically, animals that have been spayed or neutered live an average of two to three years longer than unsterilized pets.

3. Spaying or neutering saves money. Spaying is a one-time cost that is tiny when compared to the cost of providing care for a mother and a litter (or litters!) of puppies or kittens.

It’s a myth that it’s good to let a pet have “just one litter” of puppies or kittens before you get her spayed. The bottom line is that by letting your pet have that “just one litter” you contribute to the problem of pet overpopulation. Even if you find homes for the puppies or kittens, those critters produce more critters and the problem grows exponentially and quickly. One cat or dog who has babies and whose babies have babies can be responsible for the birth of 50 to 200 kittens or puppies in just one year. The reproductive rate of dogs is 15 times that of humans and the reproductive rate of cats is 30 times that of humans.

Virtually every pet rescue requires that adopted pets be spayed or neutered. These people work tirelessly to save animals every day, so do your part to help them help the animals. Spay and neuter your pets!

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Tagged: animals animal rights animal welfare holidays observances spay neuter spay day spay day usa pet companion animal dog canine cat feline overpopulation

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Last Chance for Animals - campaigns [at] lcanimal.org
Date: Jan 25, 2008 4:57 PM
Subject: Join us for Pet Theft Awareness Day 2008!

On February 14th, LCA will observe The 20th Annual National Pet Theft Awareness Day! Each year, LCA educates the public on the dangers of pet theft with the help of individuals and other animal organizations throughout the United States.

An estimated 2 million companion animals are stolen in the United States annually. Unfortunately, most stolen pet cases go unreported, so it is almost impossible to know exact numbers of missing animals, but we do know is that pet theft is a real threat! Stolen pets are sold on the street for top dollar (especially popular breeds), shipped to puppy mills for breeding, sold to animal research labs, trained for dogfights or used as “bait” by dogfighters. It is the responsibility of caretakers to protect their pets from these horrible fates. Visit www.StolenPets.com to learn how you can protect your pet.

Do you want to get involved and spread the word about Pet Theft?

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———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Tammy Grimes, Dogs Deserve Better - tammy [at] dogsdeservebetter.org
Date: Jan 22, 2008 2:05 PM
Subject: 10,000 Addresses? No Sweat…That’s Only 2 Each!

10,000 Addresses? No Sweat…That’s Only 2 Each!

Meet my newest foster, Delilah (who rumor has it is considering me for her new mommy…she talks in her sleep when she’s snuggled up to me at night, and I swear I heard her say it!) She, like Riley who so many of you generously sponsored this Holiday Season, had been living on a chain without even the ability to see to relieve the daily boredom, loneliness, and yearly sojourn into Pennsylvania’s winter cold. For she’s blind.

Can you imagine even for a moment living your life on the end of a chain not able to see? How terrifying, and so helpless to even defend yourself against intruders.

Thanks to a network of Pennsylvania volunteers, Delilah is now free and loving her inside home and family here with me, even sharing in the Christmas joys with her siblings.

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———- Forwarded message ———-
From: API Newsletters - donotreply [at] apiforanimals.org
Date: Jan 11, 2008 10:01 AM
Subject: Take Action for Birds and Tigers

Alerts at a Glance:

* Urge PETsMART to Stop Selling Birds — Diseased Birds Found in Multiple PETsMART Stores
- Contact PETsMART today to urge its management to stop treating birds like mass-produced merchandise and turn their temporary sales suspension into a permanent ban.

* Sign a Petition to Help Endangered Tigers in China
- Sign our online petition today, to urge the Chinese government to permanently ban the trade in tiger parts.

* National Bird Day Events Reminder
- January 5 was National Bird Day, and there are still great art show events happening in California this weekend in support of the birds. Or go online to view and purchase unique bird art.

* Born Free USA on the Radio
- Tune into Animal Wise Radio this Sunday to hear a bit about what we’re up to.

* Other Ways to Help Animals
** PJ Publications: Find the perfect gift for the bird lover in your life amidst a wonderful selection of animal-themed products — and benefit our work for birds.
** Make a Donation: Please consider a contribution in support of our 2008 campaigns and programs. We couldn’t do what we do without your help.

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———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Born Free USA Newsletters - donotreply [at] apiforanimals.org
Date: Jan 4, 2008 10:08 PM
Subject: Countdown to National Bird Day / Circus Animals Need Your Help

Alerts at a Glance:

* Countdown to National Bird Day, January 5, 2008
- Check out our 5 easy ways to help the birds, and the many events happening around the U.S. this weekend.

* Circus Animals Need Your Help in 2008
- Find out how you can work with us this year to help bring an end to the cruelties circus animals are forced to endure.

* Helping African Grey Parrots Regain their Freedom — Photo update
- See newly posted photos of the recent rescue efforts to help African Grey parrots confiscated in Camaroon, Africa.

* Other Ways to Help Animals
** PJ Publications: Find the perfect gift for the bird lover in your life amidst a wonderful selection of animal-themed products — and benefit our work for birds.
** Make a Donation: Please consider a contribution in support of our 2008 campaigns and programs. We couldn’t do what we do without your help.

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