There’s been a lot of talk about the arrest of 75 San Diego State University students in a drug sting recently, and now that the dust has settled a little bit, we figured it was a good time to let students at the university know why eating meat is far worse for you than smoking pot. We just placed an ad in the school newspaper The Daily Aztec, which shows a close-up of a cow's face next to the tagline "Say No to Pot Roast. Don't Be a Meathead. Kick the Habit!" The ad points out that, while there’s no doubt that getting high can hurt your test scores, people who want to stay away from drugs should stay away from meat, which is often loaded with pesticide residues, hormones, and antibiotics. Meat, egg, and dairy-product consumption have also been linked to heart disease, stroke, obesity, diabetes, and cancer. As PETA President Ingrid Newkirk puts it,

"Students probably are putting more drugs into their systems by eating the burgers and chicken salad in the school cafeteria than from anything they smoke. Chickens, pigs, and cows raised on today's factory farms are fed growth-promoting drugs by the bucketful, and that's passed on to consumers by mouth."

So there you have it, kids. Say “no” to pot roast.

I love the tagline for this new ad, which features Tricia Helfer—star of the hit Sci-Fi Channel show Battlestar Galactica. Tricia plays a ruthless cylone robot on BSG, but I know for a fact that she’s very different in real life. You wouldn’t, for instance, find a ruthless robot donating their time to pose with a kitty cat to encourage people to treat their animals humanely. Unless, like, they had some devious ulterior motives, like world domination. Which is definitely not the case with Tricia—she just really cares about animals. You can watch our interview with Tricia here, and enter to win seasons 1-3 of the show, along with the movie Razor on DVD.

The ad is absolutely stunning—that’s Tricia’s pal Mr. Nix on the left.

This coat didn’t originally belong to Lindsay … or Masha Markova

I don’t know whether or not LiLo actually stole some rich chick’s fancy fur coat, as the blogs have been suggesting this week, but I can tell you that a lot of the stories about this seem to have missed the real crime here. According to The Superficial, which is where I get pretty much all my important news nowadays, this girl called Masha Markova is accusing Lindsay of running off with her $10,000 fur coat after a party. Apparently, Masha only found out that this was where her coat had gone when she saw pics of Ms. Lohan sporting it in OK magazine. As soon as I’d gotten finished weeping about poor Masha’s terrible experience, I asked PETA Vice President Dan Mathews what he knew about the story, and he forwarded me a copy of this e-mail that he sent to Masha Markova this morning. It makes for pretty good reading:

To: Masha Markova, c/o Merrill Cohen

Dear Ms. Markova,

We at PETA have read with interest about your distress over Lindsay Lohan supposedly stealing your fur coat. Has it ever occurred to you that neither you nor Lindsay are the rightful owners? That coat belonged to dozens of animals who were electrocuted, gassed, strangled, drowned or beaten to death just so you could try to appear wealthy. Ms. Markova, people who wear fur simply show that having money and style don’t go hand in hand. Please take 5 minutes to watch this video, hosted by former fur wearer Martha Stewart, who had a change of heart about wearing real fur when she saw what the animals go through. Perhaps you, too, will find your conscience and consider donating your fur coat to PETA, as have Mariah Carey, Kim Cattrall, and hundreds of others who don’t want animals to be fashion victims. We give them to the homeless, and you would even receive a tax credit for the donation. We look forward to your reply.

Dan Mathews
VP, PETA
http://www.petatv.com/tvpopup/Prefs.asp?video=martha

P.S. I just realized that I missed an opportunity for a bunch of “Lindsay Lohan showing off her fur in public” type jokes. Please accept my humble apologies for dropping the ball on that.

We’re going full steam ahead with our efforts to permanently ban horse-drawn carriage rides in New York, and the latest high profile New Yorker to sign on to the campaign is Lea Michele, the beautiful star of the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical, Spring Awakening. Here’s what she said about her decision to do this ad on behalf of New York’s carriage horses:

"These horses are forced to work long hours in extreme weather conditions, all while walking on hard pavement and inhaling exhaust fumes. As a New Yorker, I know how tough it can be to navigate the city streets, and that's on two feet! When I see the horses attached to carriages and made to pull heavy loads in traffic, it makes me sad and angry. I want tourists to know that long after their rides are up, these horses’ miserable lives continue, day in and day out."

Thank you, Lea! I’ve posted the new ad below, and you can learn more about the campaign here.

This thing's off to an amazing start, if you ask me. Here's the first installment of 10% Wool. With that in mind, don't forget to call your newspaper and ask them to carry DeFlocked! For more details on that, check out last week's post, in case you missed it.

Click for a larger version

To check out the archives of past strips, click here.

Well, about 500 or so comments later, the thread on this post about the recent Kentucky Derby horror is still going strong. It’s clear that this issue has deeply affected a lot of people—and hopefully, all this emotion about Eight Belles’ tragedy will result in some actual reforms that will give at least some degree of protection to the horses who are abused by this industry.

I don’t usually make a point of singling out certain comments on this blog, but there were enough people who made statements along the lines of “But horses are born to race. That’s what they love,” or, like, “They’re treated better than most humans,” that I figured it was worth pointing out a few more things about the horseracing industry, which, like any industry which depends on animal domination and exploitation, will try to get away with any abusive or neglectful practice that might make them an extra dime. And the real victims—Eight Belles and the thousands of less famous horses who died under similar circumstances or else were shipped off to Europe for human consumption—live miserable lives and die painful deaths.

Here are a few key points about how this works, and there’s lots more info on this horseracing factsheet:

1. Nobody “loves to run” when they’re suffering from bleeding lungs or painful leg injuries, but that doesn’t stop trainers from pumping these animals full of drugs to mask the pain, enhance their performance and just plain keep them going. We are getting calls and faxes about all kinds of cocktail mixes that "are common knowledge in the back stretch." Sometimes people are caught and suspended when they’re careless—as was the case with this veterinarian who got busted for injecting cobra venom into a horse as a nerve blocking agent. For real.
2. Why was Eight Belles so fragile? Well, horses begin training when their skeletal systems are still growing, and they’re completely unable to deal with pounding their limbs into jelly on a hard track at high speeds. Don't tell me that all those people who "really know about horses" didn't have an inkling that this filly - a filly, no less - was a high risk for serious injuries like the ones she sustained. But she was raced anyway. Any gue$$es as to why?
3. As I mentioned before, horses that don’t make the cut get shipped off to slaughterhouses. The fact that anybody who knows this would still have the gall to comment on this blog saying that these animals are “treated better than most humans” is just too depressing to even think about.

For better or for worse, Eight Belles is now a very public representative of an industry that’s rotten to its rotten core. My only hope is that people will keep looking deeper into the way these horses are treated. And don’t dare try and tell me that they like it.

I’m actually going to leave this in the capable hands of the good folks at Deadspin. Best title for an article ever. Check it out.

In a somewhat unorthodox move, Eight Belles' owners evidently had her cremated almost immediately after her necropsy on Saturday. With this news coming right on top of a report in Sports Illustrated that the jockey riding Colonel John heard Eight Belles whinnying as they passed during the race, we want to ensure that there’s some real transparency about the investigation into this incident. Today, PETA President Ingrid E. Newkirk sent a second appeal to Commonwealth's Attorney R. David Stengel in Louisville calling for the results of her necropsy and any other tests to be made public. You can read that letter here.

Horrible as it is to watch, this video should be mandatory viewing for anyone who still believes that the egg industry treats chickens humanely. The investigation, conducted by our friends at Mercy for Animals, shows workers at one of the largest egg companies in the U.S. mercilessly abusing chickens who spend their entire lives crammed into filthy cages so small that they can barely move. If this upsets you, there are two things you can do to help. First, you can contact one of the companies that refuses to set humane standards for their suppliers even though the kind of abuse documented here is endemic to the egg industry. But the best thing you can do to help is also the easiest. If you don’t buy eggs, no one has to suffer to make them. Check out this recipe for tofu scramble to get you started.

Those wily British counterparts of mine just won’t stop pushing the envelope. I wrote last week with some pride about how their “Feeding Kids Meat Is Child Abuse” ad made the BBC’s top 10 most controversial ads list—well, according to The Guardian, they’re at it again! Apparently there have been complaints about the anti-KFC ad pictured below. Some nannies are worried (not kidding) that it “breaches the advertising code's stipulations on responsible advertising, decency and causing fear and distress.” A couple of points here: 1) I’ll admit that the prospect of KFC slicing up defenseless animals is both frightening and distressing, but surely that’s KFC’s fault, no? 2) As PETA President Ingrid Newkirk told the journalist who wrote the Guardian piece about this ad: "The cartoon image of Colonel Sanders killing a chicken on our leaflet is obviously a caricature - a comic. We cannot imagine that our leaflet would provoke fear in anyone unless the reader was a chicken." ‘Nuff said.