Erysipelothrix rhusiopathiae is a bacterium that infects pigs—usually on crowded, inhumane factory farms, where infectious diseases such as swine flu spread like wildfire. Erysipelas causes fever, chronic arthritis, heart inflammation, painful skin lesions, and often death. Up until a few weeks ago, most of us at PETA had never heard of erysipelas either.

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There is a vaccine for erysipelas, but each batch produced was tested by infecting pigs with the disease. The test caused the animals immense suffering, which was often followed by death. Enter PETA's scientists, whose heads are no doubt getting a little big right now, what with two big victories in one week.

In August, PETA's Regulatory Testing Division wrote to the USDA asking the agency to follow Europe's example and adopt a non-animal in vitro test for the erysipelas vaccine. We pointed out that the in vitro ELISA (enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay—try saying that three times fast) test is more humane and is also much more reliable than simply administering the vaccine and seeing whether or not the pigs die. It also helps to ensure vaccine consistency.

Last week, we received a response from the USDA announcing that the test involving the use of pigs will no longer be used. The icing on the cake is that the USDA also said that it is moving away from a hideously cruel method that uses mice to produce antibodies and will instead use a cell culture–based system that is humane and reliable.

Not ones to rest on our laurels, we at PETA are also working to replace animal tests with in vitro tests for tetanus, hepatitis B, whooping cough, clostridium, and leptospirosis vaccines. Already, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer is on board when it comes to ending the use of hamsters in the manufacture of leptospirosis vaccines—a decision that will save the lives of about 40,000 hamsters a year. Hopefully, we'll be able to report back with another victory soon.

Posted by Alisa Mullins

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In a chilling reminder to all meat-eaters, Saturday's New York Times recounted the tragic story of Stephanie Smith, whose meatborne illness almost killed her and left her paralyzed.

Two years ago, Smith was a dance instructor who ate a hamburger contaminated by E. coli bacteria, which happens when feces from cattle comes into contact with their flesh during the slaughter process—something that's hard to avoid when the animals are forced to lie in their own urine and feces in barren feedlots and when they are hacked apart in filthy slaughterhouses.

Stephanie experienced stomach cramping that turned into bloody diarrhea. Then her kidneys shut down. Seizures, which knocked her unconscious, were so frequent that doctors had to force her into a coma. Nine weeks later, she woke up. The virus had ravaged Stephanie's nervous system to the point that she can no longer walk, and doctors believe she will be bound to a wheelchair for the rest of her life.

The name "E. coli" comes from "colon," where E. coli is found. In other words, anything that comes into contact with feces can be contaminated. While raw vegetables can be cross-contaminated with meat or with waste runoff from factory farms, ground beef is the most common source of E. coli poisoning.

Ground beef is usually a mixture of the flesh of many cattle from several slaughterhouses. Stephanie Smith's deadly burger contained "trimmings" from one slaughterhouse in Nebraska that kills 2,600 cattle each day. Other bits of the burger came from a slaughterhouse in Texas that kills discarded dairy cows and old bulls.

According to the Times, there isn't any federal law requiring meat-grinding companies to test for E. coli. Many slaughterhouses put the fear of losing money in recalls before public safety and will only sell to grinders who agree not to do testing.

The company that made Stephanie Smith's burger continues to sell its cheap bits and pieces of dead cattle to supermarkets, fast-food restaurants, and the school lunch program, so if a dose of E. coli doesn't sound appealing, go vegan.

Posted by Heather Drennan

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Tweet collapsed in his pen while being fed on Friday. While giraffes in the wild can live into their mid 20s, Tweet was only 18 years old.

The results of Tweet's necropsy haven't been released yet, but according to a whistleblower who contacted PETA, Tweet's premature death may have resulted from his eating pieces of the blue tarp that covered his enclosure. The whistleblower alleges that Tweet's owner and trainers were notified that the giraffe had been eating the tarp but that they did nothing about it.

The whistleblower also said that Tweet spent the last few months of his life confined to a 20-foot-by-20-foot stall, which was barely large enough for the 18-foot-tall giraffe to lie down in. In their natural habitat, giraffes live in vast home ranges of up to 400 square miles.

PETA is now calling on the USDA to investigate Tweet's death. We're also asking for other people associated with the production of the movie to come forward with additional information about the treatment of animals on the set.

Posted by Shawna Flavell

Horses who pull heavy loads of tourists through noisy, polluted city streets are not retired to pastures where they graze their final days away. This anonymous contribution to PostSecret.com assures us of that.

To the anonymous poster, if your conscience bothers you, our investigators eagerly await more details.

Posted by Karin Bennett

If you visited PETA's Web site during the month of November, you probably saw turkey slaughter footage. And no, I don't mean Sarah Palin's infamous turkey pardon fail.

But have you ever seen slaughter footage from Turkey? Turns out animals are killed as cruelly there as anywhere else.

This video was taken in a slaughterhouse in Turkey, but pointlessly cruel abuse like this can happen to any animal anywhere—from the 8-day-old calf who was beaten and kicked while on her way to slaughter in the U.K., to the conscious chicken plunged into scalding-hot water in an Indian slaughterhouse, to any of the animals enduring the many horrific abuses we've documented in the U.S. at Pilgrim's Pride, Smithfield Foods, Butterball, and AgriProcessors facilities, among others.

If this video upsets you, please run, don't walk, over to GoVeg.com and order a copy of our free "Vegetarian Starter Kit." For those of you who are already vegetarians, keep this video handy and show it to the next person who asks you why you refuse to eat anybody who had a mother.

Posted by Jeff Mackey

Since we posted our action alert about Brookstone's boneheaded decision to sell live frogs and snails who are confined to minuscule "Frog-O-Spheres," we've heard from lots of people who've confirmed our worst fears about the likely fate of these animals.

Brookstone has admitted that they aren't screening potential "Frog-O-Sphere" customers, and their woefully inadequate recommendations for care—changing the water twice a year and feeding the frogs twice a week—are leading to snap decisions by unprepared people, as is likely the case with the person who posted this comment on Brookstone's Web site:

"[T]he snail died in about a week (but really, who cares?). And the recommended 2 pellets a week is not enough (the frogs are so hungry they don't move to conserve energy). When I started tripling their recommended meals, they became very active and cool. … Hopefully, they'll last until I can buy a pet snake and feed them to it."

People who are a bit more kindhearted have been flooding PETA with calls and e-mails about frogs and snails getting sick or dying, while callers to Brookstone's customer service department who complain that their frogs appear to need medical attention are merely told to put the frogs in a separate bowl. Those who call about dead frogs and snails have been told that they should throw the corpses in the garbage and that new animals can be shipped or picked up at their nearest location. As a testament to Brookstone's level of care, "replacement" animals are sent through the mail and handed to customers at the stores in plastic sandwich bags.

Other well-meaning folks are asking whether they should release the frogs into the wild, but putting non-native species into area waterways and habitats can wreak havoc on local ecosystems.

The continued sale of Frog-O-Spheres poses a clear threat to these vulnerable animals. Please add your voice to those of people who are demanding that Brookstone stop selling live animals once and for all.

Posted by Jeff Mackey

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Every year, more than 200,000 guinea pigs are abused and killed in cruel experiments—they are forced to breathe tobacco smoke, they are locked in chambers for hours at a time and forced to listen to noises as loud as a jet engine, and pregnant guinea pigs are given alcohol to cause birth defects in their babies. Of course, common sense and human-based research tells us that drinking alcohol while pregnant is a no-no, standing next to an airplane when it's taking off is not so good on the ears, and smoking cigarettes can cause disease in nearly every organ of the body.

Wait until Agent Darwin hears about this!

Posted by Justin Goodman, Research Associate Supervisor

flickr / CC

Last week, we received word from a whistleblower that a dolphin named Dixie, who is exploited in SeaWorld's Discovery Cove "swim with dolphins" attraction in Orlando, gave birth to a stillborn infant. What's more, even though SeaWorld knew that Dixie was due to give birth, the park apparently did not have a veterinarian available for Dixie at any point during or after her labor. She was forced to endure this traumatic experience—and its aftermath—without proper care.

This information came to us just a few short weeks after another dolphin, Scarlet, and her unborn fetus died at Discovery Cove. In that case, we were told that the necropsy revealed that Scarlet's uterus had ruptured while she was pregnant, causing the calf to be released into her body cavity.

These disgraceful incidents clearly show that SeaWorld and other aquariums don't really care about the well-being of the animals they incarcerate, so we have filed a complaint with the USDA calling for investigations into Scarlet's death and the lack of care provided to Dixie.

We'll keep you posted. In the meantime, if you're going to Florida this summer (or any other time), there are lots of great places to visit where your money won't go toward hurting smart, sensitive animals.

Posted by Jeff Mackey

For the first time in nearly 15 years, a human has died after being gored by a bull at the Running of the Bulls.

How many bulls have died this time around as a direct result of being gored by humans?

All of them.

banbloodsports / CC

Every year, all bulls who are sent charging down the narrow, winding streets of Pamplona end up in the bullring. We're not talking about one bull here. We're talking hundreds and hundreds over the course of 15 years.

Nobody has died at the Running of the Nudes.

You do the math.

Watch video footage of the Running of the Bulls and goring here.

Posted by Shawna Flavell

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Six dogs. Dead.

And for what? A belt buckle. A long shot at some money, a pickup truck, and a few endorsement deals. I suppose they think that they're covering themselves in glory, too, but it looks more like blood to me.

Consider this: Two of the dogs may have frozen to death in the punishing weather. Two others died with fluid in their lungs. The most recently reported death apparently happened during a turbulent plane flight after the "musher" gave up. Even the generally Iditarod-supportive Anchorage Daily News called the number of deaths—only five, at the time—"troubling," but that misses the point: Even one dog dead is too many, and it is unacceptable that the dogs who survive are run to exhaustion or injury, only to be stuck back on a chain until the next race.

To paraphrase a classic cartoon, we say it's cruelty, and we say the hell with it. PETA has asked the Alaska State Troopers to open a criminal investigation into the deaths of these dogs in the Iditarod. We'll keep you posted on any major developments. In the meantime, even though this year's event has mercifully ended, it's not too late to tell the 2009 Iditarod sponsors to make this the last year that they contribute to dogs' deaths.

Posted by Jeff Mackey

With the shock of Barbaro's death after the 2006 Preakness still fresh in their minds, the Kentucky Derby crowd saw for themselves the sordid truth about what racing means for the horses involved last night, as the filly Eight Belles was killed after collapsing on the track.

This young filly's death may have been humane, but the race sure wasn't. PETA is calling for the immediate suspension of jockey Gabriel Saez—who whipped Eight Belles mercilessly as she came down the final stretch, no doubt in agony from two front legs that were about to snap.

While the trainers, jockeys, and owners may weep their crocodile tears today over Eight Belles' euthanasia, they will be back on the track tomorrow, putting other horses at risk. Thoroughbreds are raced on hard dirt surfaces—like the one at Churchill Downs. Their bones simply can't take it, as Eight Belles' two broken front legs showed last night. Despite the wealth associated with thoroughbred racing, for the horses—most of whom end up broken, cast off, or sent to Europe to be killed for the dinner table—it's a dirty business and no better than dogfighting.

Robert Dziekanski was killed by a Taser stun gun in a Canadian airport last month. Dziekanski’s death, which has been widely reported after a video of the incident was posted on YouTube last night, is one in a long list of fatalities that have been caused by Taser stun guns. And yet Taser International continues to claim that these weapons are safe, practical tools for law-enforcement. How are they able to do this and get away with it?

The strategy’s pretty simple, actually. For years, Taser International has been funding and performing crude experiments on pigs, horses, and other animals that serve no other purpose than to provide them with “evidence” that their weapons are safe for humans. And yet as Robert Dziekanski’s death shows, the information that Taser International has been able to gather from shocking pigs is utterly useless—except insofar as it serves to protect Taser CEO Rick Smith from mounting public opposition to the use of his dangerous weapons.

The Taser situation is a perfect example of a problem that is endemic to all such animal experimentation. As is the case with so many drugs that go to market after animal testing only to be pulled from the shelves when they’re shown to be dangerous to humans, the results of these experiments have no relevance whatever to how humans will be affected, because (as should be obvious to a first-grader) pigs and horses have fundamentally different physiologies to humans. We just don’t work the same way. And the inevitable result—as we’ve seen time and again—is that companies like Taser International manipulate the data from their meaningless experiments to justify whatever argument they care to make. And people like Robert Dziekanski pay the price.

This video shows one of the hideously cruel experiments that Taser International has been performing on bulls, pigs, and other animals since they first tried to rush their weapon to market. Do we really want to stake our safety on the word of a man who does this?

What the Iditarod is really all about: advertising and sponsorship dollars. And drinking lots of beer, I guess.

Well, the first dog has died in this year’s Iditarod. Frankly, I’m surprised it took this long, and I’m sad to say it's extremely likely there’ll be more. Turns out that forcing dogs to run 125 miles a day through subzero temperatures may not be all that good for them. Shocker. Obviously, this is common sense to those of us who act like we’re living in the year 2007, but apparently the Iditarod folks like to pretend they’re paying homage to the original race, which was along a mail route to deliver an emergency supply of diphtheria serum (whatever that is) to Nome.

Anyway, Iditaroders, next time you guys need some diphtheria serum delivered, I’m sure FedEx will be glad to help you out with that. And let’s be real here, this race is about money, plain and simple—you’re not preserving heritage or paying homage to anyone by running a few hundred dogs into the frozen ground every year.

The Ikidarod

The upshot here is that there are countless alternatives to this cruel tradition. How about a ski race along the same route—the Iskidarod maybe? Or an eBay sponsored marathon auction—the Ibidarod? The world’s largest game of hide and seek—Ihidarod. A marathon film festival—Ividarod? There actually is an event in California called the Ikidarod, where kids pull sleds on a beach, and the reality is that there really are 1001 ways for the Iditarod folks to line their pockets without hurting dogs.

Anyway, here’s to hoping that no more dogs die this year . . . Oh, and if you’re so inclined you can let the Iditarod sponsors know you feel about this absurd race here.