No Kill Advocacy Video

Sign petition for humane treatment of poultry. I did!

Since the 1950s, federal law has required that all livestock be rendered "insensible to pain" before slaughter. Seems like such a modest requirement reflecting our society's belief that animals should not suffer unnecessarily, right? Yet this most basic requirement does not extend to more than 95 percent of the farm animals slaughtered for food in this country - 9 billion a year - simply because the law does not explicitly mention poultry (chickens, turkeys, ducks, and other birds).

Poultry deserve the same basic protections that cows, pigs, lambs, and other livestock have. Join thousands of Americans in urging Congress to amend the law by signing the petition here.

Click here for more information.

Feline Enrichment: How to entertain your cats Part 1

Enrichment research has shown that toys that are removed and then returned after several weeks regain much of their novelty; extend your enrichment budget by rotating your cat's toys regularly.

Provide different toys, different days of the week.

• paper bags
• used pens with ink removed (just the outer part of the pen, remove everything inside and the lid)
  
• plastic milk caps
• film canisters (empty or put bells, pennies, rice, etc inside to make noise)
  
• ping pong balls (put them in the bathtub for enclosed fun!)
  
• treat balls (can use whiffle balls)
  
• flashing balls
• cork?
• tissue paper (supervised play!)
  
• tunnels
  
• paper towel rolls (rip the roll a little to give it more appeal)
  
• child's sock filled with catnip and sewn closed
• tie shoestrings to cage bars
• put pipe cleaners on cage bars, or twist around finger to make a spiral and put on the floor
• spools with thread removed
• any box, even one that seems too small for your cat. Cats are notorious for attempting to fit into small boxes
  

Put squirrel/bird feeders/bird baths outside each window.
Provide places in the sun to sleep.
Provide cat grass or other types of greens. Catnip, Thyme, Sage, Mint and Parsley are good alternatives.

Take your cats out for a walk (seriously)!
Click here to be directed to my website where I describe the process of teaching your cat to walk on a harness.

People are so stupid.

Last night, Jack, one of my foster cats did something weird. It is not life threatening or even something warranting a visit to the vet. I typed in my question into google and came up with many results.

There are numerous questions online from stupid people with actual emergencies with their pets who are just posting the question online and...I guess...waiting for the "internet" to answer them.

What are these people thinking!?! Take your animals to the freaking vet!

For example, someone asked about their dog vomiting white foam, one said their cat had thrown up six times that day, one that hasn't peed for two days...all of these are potentially life threatening and cannot wait. If your cat, especially a male cat, has not peed in two days, it could die the next day.

Why are people so ignorant? Even if I was not educated about the health of cats and did not have experience with them, I would consider all of these incidents life threatening. I would not post the question online and wait for an answer. I would be in the car on the way to the vet.

People might say that they can't afford it. Well, if your child was throwing up six times, would you not take them to the hospital? No, of course not. You would get them the medical care they needed and figure out how to pay later.

Responsible pet parents would do that. Not having the money is not an excuse. Your pets depend on you to take care of them.

Peta offering $1 Million for "test tube" chicken.

While I disagree with much of Peta's tactics and actions, I am with them on this one.

The details:

PETA is offering a $1 million prize to the contest participant able to make the first in vitro chicken meat and sell it to the public by June 30, 2012. The contestant must do both of the following:

• Produce an in vitro chicken-meat product that has a taste and texture indistinguishable from real chicken flesh to non-meat-eaters and meat-eaters alike.
• Manufacture the approved product in large enough quantities to be sold commercially, and successfully sell it at a competitive price in at least 10 states.

Judging of taste and texture will be performed by a panel of 10 PETA judges, who will sample the in vitro chicken prepared using a fried "chicken" recipe from VegCooking.com. The in vitro chicken must get a score of at least 80 when evaluated in order to win the prize.

According to Peta.org, In vitro meat production would use animal stem cells that would be placed in a medium to grow and reproduce. The result would mimic flesh and could be cooked and eaten.

I am a vegetarian. I am 27 and have not eaten chicken for nearly 4 years and all other meat since I was 12 or 13. I am not sure if I would eat this new meat but I am sure meat eaters would. This would help our world so much if someone could make this.

Some facts about the effects of eating meat on the environment:

• According to the Sierra Club, producing one pound of grain-fed beef requires about 16 pounds of wheat and - as staggering as it sounds - 2,500 gallons of water. Furthermore, millions of acres of forest have been cleared worldwide to make room for the large areas of land needed for cattle grazing. In the United States, more than 260 million acres of forest have been cleared to grow crops to feed animals raised for meat. An acre of trees disappears every eight seconds.
• Livestock is fed more than 80 percent of the corn and 95 percent of the oats grown by American farmers. The world' s cattle alone consume a quantity of food equal to the caloric needs of 8.7 billion people - more than the entire human population on Earth. Link to Article
  
• A recent report prepared for the Senate Agricultural Committee concluded that animal waste is the largest contributor to pollution in 60 percent of the rivers and streams classified as " impaired" by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The report states that food animals produce waste at a rate of roughly 68,000 pounds per second. Link to Article
• Harvard nutritionist Jean Mayer estimates that a 10-percent reduction in U.S. meat consumption would free up enough grain to feed 60 million people. Some 40 percent of the world' s grain harvest is fed to livestock, while nearly a billion people go hungry each day. Link to Article
• According to CNN.com,90 percent of all large fishes have disappeared from the world's oceans in the past half century, the devastating result of industrial fishing.

Learn more:

Article-Why Eating Meat isn't Natural.

Summary of Article

• Human anatomy is much more similar to herbivores than carnivores.
• Meat consumption unquestionably promotes heart disease, cancer, diabetes, osteoporosis, and every other major degenerative disease -- the opposite of plant-based diets.
• Physical performance is superior on all-plant diets.
• Making one contrary point does not magically invalidate all the other evidence as soon as it's made.

YouTube Video from the Humane Society of the United States on Factory Farming.

Photos/Videos of Factory Farming from the Humane Farming Association

Environmental Impact of Factory Farming

Take Action for World Week for Animals in Laboratories

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.

Click here to find events in your area!

Imagine how powerful we could be if everyone reading this would just take a few minutes to engage in even one action for animals in labs.

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, only that which focuses on nicotine's effect on fetal and newborn development.

Animal researchers staunchly defend these experiments as necessary for improving maternal and newborn health. But answers don't come from animal studies. After decades of animal studies, we still have not solved the problem of smoking during pregnancy. Only education, public health outreach, and prevention programs can address the human behaviors that lead to smoking.

Please call and/or email the following individuals today to politely urge the NIH to stop funding nicotine experiments on animals and instead redirect funds towards prevention, education and smoking cessation programs. Then follow up with a letter, fax and/or personal email:

Elias Zerhouni, M.D.
Director, National Institutes of Health
Building 1, Shannon Bldg RM 126
1 Center Drive, MSC 0148
Bethesda, MD 20892-0148
Email: ez26y@nih.gov
Tel: (301) 496-2433
Fax: (301) 402-2700

Norka Ruiz Bravo, Ph.D.
Deputy Director: Office of Extramural Research
1 Center Drive, MSC 0152 (Room 144)
Bethesda, MD 20892-0152
Email: ruizbran@od.nih.gov
Tel: (301) 496-1096
Fax: (301) 402-3469