BBC News has just released a list of the top 10 most controversial ads of 2007, and our edgy, boundary-pushing counterparts over in the UK made the list with their “Feeding Kids Meat Is Child Abuse” billboard, which received a whopping 68 complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority in 2007. The way I see it, with literally millions of advertisements bombarding the public every day with messages about how they can make their teeth whiter, or, like, more effectively pluck their eyebrows, creating an ad that makes people stop and think—and that affects some people so profoundly that they’re shocked out of their complacency—is not an easy thing to do. So, excellent work, PETA UK.

It may not be a message that people want to hear, but it’s an important one (a point that was recognized by the Advertising Standards Authority, which ruled that the ad does not trivialize abuse, as complainants had claimed). And, of course, when you consider that feeding kids meat sets them on the road to a higher risk of heart attacks, diabetes, and a whole slew of other health problems, the ad isn’t exactly misstating the case. Here’s the BBC list of controversial ads, and here’s the billboard that’s causing all the fuss. I’d love to hear what you think.

I’m just going to come out and say this: PETA is offering 1 million dollars (say it in your best Dr. Evil voice) to the first team of scientists that can develop a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro (lab-grown) chicken meat.

The figure was reached by a team of math nerds working in PETA’s basements who have determined that 1 million is actually very close to the number of chickens killed every hour in the United States—so there’s a nice element of symbolism to the offer as well. But symbolism aside—we’re deadly serious about helping to fund developments in this new science, which has the potential to end the suffering of literally billions of animals if a commercially viable lab meat is made available. As PETA President Ingrid Newkirk puts it:

"People are surprised to learn that PETA is interested in lab-grown meat, but we have overcome our own revulsion at flesh-eating to champion a breakthrough that will mean a far kinder world for animals. One million dollars is a lot of money, but it's a small price to pay for something that has the potential to save about 1 million lives every hour."

To qualify for the prize, scientists in the field must be able to produce a quantity of meat that is sufficient to market in at least 10 U.S. states at a price that is competitive with prevailing chicken prices.

There’s plenty more information on our contest page. Once you’ve had a look at it, let me know what you think. I’d love to hear from both vegetarians and meat-eaters—would you eat lab meat?

Did anyone catch the America’s Next Top Model last night, where the models wrapped themselves in meat and paraded around a slaughterhouse? I honestly don’t know what to say about this, except, like, please don’t do that anymore, ANTM. You’re going to alienate a lot of viewers who care about animals.

Fortunately, we have a Communications Department for these sorts of occasions, and (thankfully) they’re way more articulate than I am. So here’s PETA’s official response to the ill-conceived show for those who have been writing in about it:

No matter how beautifully it is presented, flesh from a tortured animal is flesh from a tortured animal. Meat represents bloody violence and suffering, so if that’s the look they were going for—they achieved it. Instead of swathing models in meat, we wish they had followed in the footsteps of PETA pinups Pamela Anderson and Alyssa Milano who show off their “natural beauty” in outfits made of lettuce leaves for PETA’s “Let Vegetarianism Grow on You” ad campaign.

dListed has pics and details.

This one’s a total winner, from the folks at PETA Asia Pacific, who want you to know that eating meat can lead to impotence. Check out the brand-new ad below, and click here to see it in context, doing its job in the men’s room of a Bangkok bar.

You hear politicians and journalists complain all the time about how grueling it is to follow the campaign trail, but none of those guys ever had to do it in a pink pig costume (to my knowledge). So I want to take a moment to recognize my colleague Ashley Byrne and the brave PETA interns Chris Arellano and Lacey Knox who have been showing up at campaign stops around the country to drum up support for PETA’s call for an excise tax on meat. These pics from South Carolina—where the pigs were a big hit with democrats and republicans alike—are pretty damn adorable.

Earlier this morning, PETA sent a letter to Yankees pitcher Roger Clemens (the latest player to face scrutiny in the steroids scandal), urging him to prove that he is committed to being drug-free—by going vegetarian. I’ll leave it for the sports pundits to discuss whether or not Clemens ever deliberately took steroids to help with his pitching, but there's no question that the guy has been ingesting growth-promoting drugs for as long as he’s been a meat-eater. In order to make them grow fatter faster and to ward off the disease in the filthy conditions on today's factory farms, cows, pigs, and chickens are pumped full of growth-promoting hormones, and anyone who eats their flesh will be getting an unhealthy dose of the drugs themselves—no injections from trainers required.

As an aside, I should point out that this is by far the nicest letter that my friend and colleague Dan Shannon—who is an avid Red Sox fan—has ever written to a Yankee. You can check it out here.

Someone should probably tell this pig and cow that they’re not going to win any elections if their only platform is raising taxes, but the argument is a solid one: In addition to being a leading cause of global warming, meat causes cancer and heart disease—driving health-care costs through the roof. Alcohol, tobacco, and gasoline are subject to a “sin” tax, so meat should be too. We’re asking congress to tax meat at 10 cents per pound to offset its staggering costs, and these two have been following the presidential candidates all around the campaign trail to make that point. In a Mustang Convertible, which gives the whole thing a bit of flair. This pic’s from one of the Iowa stops:

There’s been so much going on this week that I never got a chance to mention it, but these pictures from the Barry Bonds hearing are just too good to pass up. PETA’s lovely lettuce ladies showed up to hand out faux-turkey sandwiches to bystanders and make the point that if we’re so concerned about hormones and growth-promoting drugs, we probably shouldn’t be eating animals who are pumped full of them in factory farms. I know it’s a wee bit of a stretch to try and connect this important point to baseball, but it’s a lot easier to make those mental leaps when the person making the point is friendly, scantily clad, and offering you lunch. I’m told that the demonstration went over very well, and the sandwiches were universally enjoyed—so nice work, girls. You can read more on the story in USA Today.

So, after years of hard work by animal protection advocates exposing the extreme cruelty involved in these operations, some of the last horse slaughterhouses in the U.S. were shut down. But the folks in the horse-racing and horse-carriage industries still need to do something with the thousands of horses who are rendered useless to them every year due to old age or outright abuse. So they’ve been sending these animals across the border to Mexico, which has even more lax regulations for its slaughterhouses than the abysmal standards in the U.S.—and the results are positively gruesome.

The good news is that there’s a bill on the table that would ban the export of horses to foreign slaughterhouses called the American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act, and we’re pushing hard right now to help get it passed. You can click here to learn more about the act and write to your Representatives through our online form to ask that they support the new bill to protect horses.

For anyone who still has doubts about the power of the internet, check out this AP story about 14-year-old Amy Bareijan. Amy wanted to go vegetarian after watching Meet Your Meat on YouTube, so she posted her own video asking for people’s advice and personal experiences that may help her. The response was overwhelming, to say the least. Check out the story here.

The video that started it all:

Sooooooo, a lot of blogs have been talking about this weird new concept of "Vegansexuals". Some psychologist in New Zealand coined the word after conducting a study which found that some vegans just don't really like to do it with meat-eaters. A high percentage of respondents evidently reported that meat-eaters smell funky. Tucker Carlson reported on the story last week, and made the claim out of left field that being a vegan kills your sex drive. I have no idea where Tucker pulled this myth from (maybe a bad experience with a lethargic hippie in college?), but I can guarantee that if he just finds the right vegan girl, he'll change his mind quicker than it takes him to put on that dapper new tie of his in the morning.

Tucker did follow up the story the next day with a nice piece in which he read our statement on the topic—he claims he hasn’t changed his opinion yet, but he’ll come around. … Anyway, onto PETA's position: We're pro inter-dietary dating for about a million reasons; for one thing, if you're ever going to persuade someone that they need to stop eating animals, you need to be around them, talk to them, listen to their point of view, and, hell, sometimes even sleep with them. Being vegan isn't about being in a club, and while there's nothing wrong with having a preference for someone who shares your views, I wouldn't want anyone to think that giving up meat means you have to drain the ol’ dating pool at the same time. As Tucker pointed out, going vegetarian is supposed to get you girls, not cut off your options.

Finally, on a more personal note, sometimes it’s difficult enough as it is. I'll take it where I can damn well get it.

P.S. Eating meat causes impotence.

We've been getting a lot of calls from people asking what we're going to do about some new websites that are being passed around, called KittyBeef.com and PuppyBeef.com, which are purporting to sell prime cuts from kittens and puppies at discount prices. Well, the simple answer is … we're not really going to do all that much about it at all. In fact, I kind of wish we'd thought of the idea ourselves. For anyone who's horrified by the concept of having puppy chops or kitten nuggets for dinner, I hope they'll go just one tiny step further in their outrage and ask themselves how that's any different from chowing down on pork chops or chicken.

At the risk of getting a little rhetorical here, animals killed for our kitchens are just as capable of suffering as the animals we keep in our homes. They're just as smart, just as loving, and the prospect of the horrors that are inflicted on them by the meat industry keeps me up at night and fills me with the same anguish as reports of people who chain their dogs or torture their cats.

If these websites weren't clearly hoaxes, PETA would do something about it—but we wouldn’t make any ethical distinction between addressing that issue and getting KFC to stop abusing chickens—or asking people to go vegetarian. Just for a week, or a day, if you find it hard to get out of the old routine at first. And especially if the idea of having your kitten or puppy bled out and turned into prime cuts gives you the cold sweats. 'Cause it's happening right now to billions of other animals who are just as entitled to kindness, but never experience anything even remotely like it.

PETA India's Campaign Coordinator, Rohini Kamath, just sent me some photos from a couple of protests that she and her colleagues held this week to draw attention to, respectively, the cruelty of the dairy industry, and the hypocrisy inherent in eating meat and trying to save the environment at the same time. Check 'em out:

Bound to a wheelchair and carrying a sign reading, “The dark side of dairy,” PETA India’s cow mascot, Ganga, protested the hideous cruelty of the dairy industry on World Milk Day. The activists also held signs emblazoned with the slogan “Doodh: not so cool, Dude,” and, though it's not entirely clear to me what that means, I'm told that if you say that to someone in Ahmedabad, they'll cut the dairy right out of their diet in a hot second.

And …

Eating out of a giant earth and holding signs reading “You Can't Be a Meat Eating Environmentalist” the PETA India folks held a demonstration on World Environment Day to protest the massive environmental devastation caused by the meat industry.

PETA India — you guys are, hands down, my favorite PETA affiliate. OK, fine, I say that to all the affiliates, but I'm totally smitten with that globe-eating demonstration. Keep up the great work.

What do you do when you have more naked activists than life-size, cellophane-wrapped meat trays? Double up. At least that was how they handled it at Princeton University yesterday, to striking effect. The demonstration, which was a joint protest organized by PETA and the Princeton Animal Welfare Society to draw attention to the suffering of animals used by the meat industry, got two different front page stories in the Daily Princetonian, including this one, about a follow-up presentation given by Dan Mathews to explain in a bit more detail why PETA does these kinds of demonstration instead of just putting on a suit and tie and pointing out the various inadequacies in the Humane Methods of Livestock Slaughter Act. (The short answer, by the way, is that we do both, but people don't always show up for the latter presentation.) Anyway, here are some pics:

Does eating meat affect sperm count? Tom Simpson/Creative Commons

OK, so there is plenty of talk about the whole meat-eating/impotence connection. I mean, who can forget Rocket Boy, Brad and all the rest? But the new research in the UK linking meat consumption by pregnant women with low sperm counts in their sons 25+ years later is seriously disturbing.

The gist of it is that scientists now believe that steroids and sex hormones, like estrogen and testosterone—used to make cows grow faster—could interfere with the development of unborn babies, affecting male sperm production later in life. It makes perfect sense if you think about it: cows eat hormones/steroids, women eat cows, fetuses exposed to insane levels of hormones. As if there aren’t enough reasons to stop eating animals already ...

You can check out what the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has to say about vegan diets during pregnancy here, and if you’re already a parent, there's some good information on raising healthy veggie kids here.

For all the good he's done for the environment—which, to be fair, is an awful lot—Al’s leaving out a huge piece of the puzzle by ignoring the fact that the devastation caused by the meat industry is among the worst environmental disasters ever to happen to the world. As we told him in our letter, sent earlier this week:

While the steps that you urge people to take in An Inconvenient Truth are inarguably important, the quickest and most effective way to fight climate change will come through diet change.

An inconvenient truth for him, maybe, but it’s the truth nonetheless. Since he might not have seen the recent U.N. reports on the subject, we pointed out to him that animals raised for food generate more greenhouse gases than all cars and trucks combined, and that (according to a recent University of Chicago study), switching to a vegan diet is more effective in countering global warming than switching from a standard American car to a Prius. We've also offered to cook him some faux "fried chicken" as an introduction to meat-free meals, since, however many documentaries you make, you just can't be a meat-eating environmentalist. I'll let you know if he gets back to us.

After PETA UK released its brand-new "Feeding Kids Meat Is Child Abuse" billboard, a number of groups complained about the ad to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). Having a brief look through the list of complainants, it really seems like they all have something in common, but I just can't quite put my finger on it. It does strike me as a bit weird that The National Farmers' Union, the Guild of Welsh Lamb and Beef Suppliers, and the International Meat Trade should suddenly come down with a case of social responsibility, but who am I to question them? I'm sure they're just worried about Britain's children. It's a moot point though, as the ASA rejected the complaints and cleared the ad, because, honestly, if feeding dead bodies to your kids isn't widely considered to be abusive, it probably should be …

Either way, the ad's a classic. Check it out:

I've been reading a lot of stories in the press lately about these new scientific breakthroughs which could enable meat to be grown from animal cells in labs instead of being removed from real animals in factory farms. Best case scenario is that test tube meat could hit the market in about 10 years, though there needs to be a lot more funding for it than there is at the moment. In addition to being kind of a cool concept, lab meat would obviously be a lot more pleasant for animals, who could be pretty much removed from the whole equation. If it works, I think I could see myself rocking the occasional lab-meat sandwich somewhere down the line, maybe with a little lab barbeque sauce for flavor. I'll cross that bridge when I get to it, but in the meantime I definitely hope they get their funding.

Related Links

New York Times
University of Maryland's Press Release